Archive for March, 2015
Ruby Wedding Anniversary – 40 years of bliss that started in Mexico City
40 short years ago in the colonial suburb of Mexico City, Coyoacan, an adventurous Dane and a crazy American promised to live their lives together. So far, so good!
There’s a bit of an interesting story surrounding this picture. And I’m not talking about the wild adventures through Central America that led up to this moment. We had planned a wonderful wedding and dinner at the San Angel Inn, a beautiful 16th century colonial restaurant now in southern Mexico City. Just one month before the wedding, I came down with hepatitis, amoebic dysentery and salmonella. With the doctor’s assurance that I’d be fine for the wedding date, we didn’t change our plans.
Three days before the wedding, we accepted the reality that I was not going to stand out of bed for more than an hour. Jesper quickly arranged for the Mexican judge to come to us instead of the San Angel Inn. BTW, all marriages in Mexico are civil. The religious ceremony comes after and has no legal status. My girlfriend rescued the dress which I had intended to sew myself, finishing the last touches at the last minute, and our friends crowded into our apartment in Coyoacan overlooking Mexico City.
I literally stood up, got dressed, inked my thumbprint into a massive ledger, gave the appropriate responses in Spanish to the questions posed by the judge – and then went back to bed. As you can imagine, there were quite a few jokes about the bride waiting in the next room.
What easily could have been taken as a terrible omen didn’t turn out that way. 40 years later, we’re still holding hands. And still smiling.
S. L. Gore 