The Speech

Only one thing marred the festivities, albeit only for two people and only later did I discover it. Once again, I didn’t know wedding etiquette. I didn’t realize that the bride and groom don’t really give speeches at their own weddings. If I had known, I probably wouldn’t have cared anyway. This was a moment of great import for me. I was about to move on into a whole new phase of life. Before I did, I wanted to give tribute to the people who had helped get me to where I was that day.

I’m not good at giving speeches but I had spent much time writing and refining what I wanted to say. Through my relationship with Laura, I had discovered a major flaw in my life. At the beginning of our relationship, I found that I could not accept her love. 

I discovered that, while I had friends, I didn’t feel like I needed them. Part of that was that I didn’t want to be vulnerable. I didn’t want to open up so much that I had the potential to get hurt. Part of it was my investment-type view of friendships. If people invested in me, I felt like I needed to eventually pay them back materially.

There were some people in my life, however, who had invested so much into me that I could never repay them – my parents and my brother. I had considered my father to be my best friend. When he died I had symbolically transferred that best friendship over to my brother. But I knew he couldn’t replace my dad and I started to finally really appreciate the other friendships I had. Then Laura came along.

All this I said in my speech, crying most of the time because of the emotion it was inducing about my dad. Shortly into my speech, someone asked me if I needed a handkerchief. I didn’t because I usually carried one with me. To Laura’s horror, I pulled it out. I was single and I didn’t bleach my whites and I didn’t get rid of my handkerchiefs until they had fallen apart. My white handkerchief was very gray.

I also honored my other groomsmen – Ron and Tom. Of Ron I said, 

        “You don’t get to choose your family but in Ron’s case, we did.” 

As far as Tom, when my father died he had called me in England and I found his call to be one of the most comforting to me. I also honored my mom. I honored her as a mom who had considered raising her children to be the most important task of her life.

At the end of the speech I said, 

        “Laura, you’re my best friend - sorry Samuel.” 

Samuel said no problem as I’m sure my declaration of best friendship was not reciprocated. Afterwards, Perry, who was married to Laura’s best friend, Robyn got back up and said, 

        “I feel kind of disoriented, now being the best friend of the second-best friend, once removed.”

The one problem with all of this was that I had naively expected that Laura was also going to make a speech to thank all of her friends and parents, not realizing that that just wasn’t done. So I had inadvertently offended my new parents-in-law on the first day of our marriage by honoring everyone and their uncle (well, my uncle), yet not mentioning they who had paid for all of this.

For our honeymoon, we planned to carry out what we had discussed in one of our early conversations – to travel in Europe together (now that we could do it morally). The only time limit we had was Laura’s sister’s wedding back in California in a couple of months where Laura would be the matron of honor. So with those plans and some others that got added, we ended up with a three-month honeymoon.

We spent the first few nights in a brand-new hotel on the beach nearby in the barrier island town of Atlantic Beach. Once we settled into the hotel room, we got cracking on one of the most important parts of any newly-wed couple’s life together – counting the loot. Since we were going to be living in London, presents would have been impractical. People gave us money instead.

Right after the ceremony at the cake reception, Tommy had handed me an envelope and told me to make sure I didn’t lose it because it held something very valuable. Much to my dismay, when we started counting, I couldn’t find the envelope. I was panic-stricken. But while I tried to think about where I had put it, we counted the rest.

The ship ministry alone gave us a very generous gift. I believe that was, because of my parents, I represented such a great investment in the ministry. That covered the money Laura’s parents had offered us to have a double wedding.

As we finished counting all the cash and checks, I finally found the envelope from Tommy in an inside pocket of my jacket. It contained another large check, which brought the total to a very significant amount for us. We were amazed.

The next day it was too cold to go swimming in the ocean but we went on a long walk down the beach. Laura’s family were also still at the beach house not too far from our hotel so we had dinner with them all in a local restaurant that evening. 

We spent another week on the East Coast visiting friends. Our only deadline to get back to London was a concert. I had tickets for an Irish group called Clannad. They were performing in one of my favorite concert venues - The Royal Albert Hall, a beautiful round, red-bricked, ornamented concert hall right next to Hyde Park. I turned 22 the day before we flew out of Washington/Dulles for London.

Da Boiz