ceteris non paribus

I could have sworn I blogged about this before, but I guess not.

The bobble during Obama’s swearing-in caused me to remember my wedding day. No, I wasn’t being married to a supreme court justice, but it was more important to me than the recent inauguration, believe it or not.

During a Quaker wedding ceremony:

Following a period of silence, as long or as short as the couple is led to observe, the two rise and, each in turn taking the other by the hand, make their promises to each other, in the words from their marriage certificate, in tones clear enough to be heard throughout the meeting.

In the run-up to the wedding, Lindy and I had agreed to “use the vows in Faith and Practice“, and checked off the “write vows” item on the checklist. Easy, peasy, right?

Come the day of the wedding, I stood and, in tones clear enough to be heard throughout the meeting, said my vows. Lindy took her turn and, I thought, got it a bit wrong. “Ah, well,” I thought, “it’s the thought that counts.”

It wasn’t until we escaped into the getaway car that we compared notes and discovered that we were both right. Turns out that I had used the 1972 edition of F&P and she’d used the 1997 version. Whups!

I’m pretty sure that Justice Roberts doesn’t have that same excuse, though.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 18:41 and is filed under memories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.