My Wife Zsuzsa - Part 11

Sunday morning, August 13, 2000, my first thought when I woke up was, "What in the world did I almost do last night? Have I lost my mind?!" Throughout the morning as I got ready for church, the idea seemed less and less crazy to me. When Zsuzsa and I first greeted each other that morning, we were both kind of looking at each other and tested the waters like, "So, are we still going back up to Reno to get married today?" We both acted like we were settled on it, but we both had our doubts about it and were trying to read whether or not the other had doubts.

We went to the Sunday morning service, and Pastor Nichols preached a sermon called "Childhood and Youth are Vanity" from Ecclesiastes 11. I took the sermon as a confirmation that getting married was a great idea. I was 19, and she was 21. Time to grow up!

After church we drove through Arby's and headed straight for Reno. We went to the wedding chapel and then headed for City Hall to get a marriage license. To get the marriage license, all we needed was to each show our ID to prove that we were both adults. As Zsuzsa showed her passport, and I showed my driver's license, I noticed the lady behind the counter writing my address on a form.

"You're not going to send anything to that address, are you?"

"No. Why?"

"Because my parents don't know that I'm getting married, and I don't want them getting anything in the mail about it before I've told them."

"No, don't worry, we won't send anything."

Back at Chapel of the Bells, we had the most basic possible wedding ceremony (lasted about 2 minutes) and headed back to Roseville to consummate the marriage.

Later that evening we had to drive to my uncle's house where my brother was because we had already agreed to go by there that Sunday night in order to plan an upcoming backpacking trip that had been scheduled before we knew that we were getting married, and I didn't want to tip anyone off that something was up by not being there. We only stayed for 20 minutes because we obviously wanted to be alone together as much as possible since we had just gotten married.

We had a wonderful afternoon, evening, and next morning together, but she was still scheduled to fly back to Germany later in the day Monday...and no one yet knew that we were married!

To be continued...