46 Years Ago...

warning: this is the "exclamation mark" post, OK? I will try to use less of them as I finish writing, but you have been forewarned! ;-)

...my parents got married in Curitiba, Parana (Brasil)! (one photo here)

My uncle Hugo married them on his birthday, he was turning 35 and today was his 81st birthday!

I was talking to my mom on the phone about their wedding earlier this evening and she said that my aunt Ofélia (the oldest of my dad's four sisters) congratulated mom on facebook and wrote "I never met someone again  that lost their shoes on their wedding day!" And my mom said that she didn't even remember that -- but it was a big (super stressful) part of her day!

The last time I heard the full story was years ago, but we should have her tell it to all of us sometime soon again. And we also need to have the 16 mm movie of that day turned into a DVD!!

In today's phone call I was asking if the lost shoe had made her late, but no, it wasn't that, something else delayed her wedding for an hour! I'll get to that in a minute, but first, a few anecdotes about that day.

My mom had purchased the shoe and left it inside her wardrobe, but one day her older sister decided to organize the clothes and she had the "bright" idea of hanging the shoe (which was in a stringed bag) from one of the hangers. Unfortunately when the wedding day came my mom just couldn't find the shoe and to her chagrin and stress she had to go buy another one!

Another funny story is that my paternal grandmother wanted to make her son, the groom, look beautiful, so she got this bottle of perfume and reportedly poured the whole thing on my dad! He then went and took another shower to try to get rid of some of the strong scent.

I'm sure there were many other things, but the real "scandal" according to my mom was that she was really late for the wedding ceremony (about an hour) -- something unheard of and very rude at that time, she told me. The problem is that they needed to be married by a justice of the peace first and my dad's uncle was going to be the notary public in the civil ceremony. It turns out that the notary uncle was told to go to my mom's brother Paulo's house for the civil marriage, but he didn't know that Paulo had moved so he went to Paulo's old house, waited for an hour and then went back home. It took everyone a long time to figure out where the notary had gone and by then the justice of peace had left! They signed all the papers anyway after the notary uncle showed up because there couldn't have been a religious ceremony without the civil one having taken place. My mom said that they could have annulled their marriage afterwards because no justice of peace had been present!

Needless to say they never did that and 46 years they are still very happy together. Happy Anniversary, mom and dad! I'm sorry there was so much stress on your wedding day!