Canoe, Atlanta, Georgia, May 21, 2010
Three years ago tonight we rehearsed getting married and then shared a lovely dinner with many of our nearest and dearest on the banks of the Chattahoochee. A lot has changed since then — these days we have an adorable dog, shorter hair and better jobs, and Jon wouldn’t be caught dead wearing pleated pants — but we’re still as weird and nerdy (respectively) as this photo would have you believe.
Posted in family, grown-up stuff, love, nostalgia, Old-Timey Tuesday, weddings
Elks Lodge, Johnson City, Tennessee, September 1, 1972
Colonial Heights, Kingsport, Tennessee, September 2, 1972
Dad sneaked me a few slides to have scanned in the run up to his and mom’s anniversary — these are some of my favorites from the festivities. Perfection.
…that my parents got married! If you’ve been following along for a while, you might recall that they were debate partners and high school sweethearts. Here’s their prom picture from 1966, my mom’s senior year, to jog your memory:
This weekend my siblings and I threw them an anniversary party, which you’ll read more about in coming days. In preparation for the event I spent a lot of time digging through the basement, scanning photos and hunting for video, and I managed to turn up a reel of super 8 film that my mom’s uncle shot on the day of their wedding. I had it converted, then edited it down (read: removed the really, really dark parts) and made a little movie to show at the party. It’s a bit fuzzy, but it’s a fun watch — especially if you know my family. My mom has, apparently, always been a total ham. Enjoy!
Laura & Jim, September 2, 1972 from Kathleen Poe Ross on Vimeo.
In mid-September, I will have the honor of bridesmaiding for my college roommate, and she has kindly allowed each bridesmaid to pick out the J. Crew bridesmaid dress (of a particular color and fabric) that suits her best. The store just released a couple new styles for the line, so I ordered them to see if they might be better options for me than my original choice, which was strapless and, oddly, a bit shorter than all the other dresses in the fabric.
I emailed the bride, my sister, my mom, another former roommate, a coworker and two of my best friends to see what they thought of my choices, and the breakdown of preferences so amused me (mom and sister strongly disliked the one that all my friends loved) that I wanted to post a poll to help me decide. First, the dresses, in two lights (and please ignore my awful commuter’s tan):
And now, the all-important question:
Help me, people!
Now that it’s been a month since our second anniversary, I should probably post about it, huh? Last year’s celebration was a multi-day hit-and-miss affair; this year we decided to keep things low-key (and relatively inexpensive), particularly since it fell on a school night, so to speak.
Because Jon is forever a little kid when it comes to presents, the day started out with exchanging gifts. It’s possible I was still in bed when Jon brought me mine. The traditional gift for your second anniversary is something cotton; I love the challenge of sticking to a theme. Jon gave me a band t-shirt, and I gave him seersucker pants and a gift card toward a custom dress shirt. (I later noted that we each got the other their favorite form of cotton clothing. Good job us!) I also got Jon this awesome card: 
(He studied saxophone in college and now plays for the dog on occasion.)
That night after work, we got fancied up and had a lovely dinner at Empire State South. They didn’t have an appetizer I had seen and lusted after on the online menu and our waiter was kind of pretentious and inattentive, but the food was delicious and the meal didn’t totally break the bank; we counted it as a win. Besides, any meal that ends with phatty cakes is bound to be a triumph.
Pleasantly full, we left and drove around the block to the W Midtown, where we had lodged and afterpartied the night of our wedding, for a nightcap. As we entered the lobby, the doorman said, “Welcome back!” How did he know?
We ordered drinks in the lounge area then went in search of the secret cave beneath the staircase where we and our friends had spent a couple of hours once we left the clubby bar. I forget now who discovered it, but we were apparently quite lucky to have landed it that night, I was recently told; normally it’s a first-come-first-serve battle for those in the know. It was somewhat less lively with just the two of us, but it was cool to be back in that space and confirm that it was not merely a figment of our collective imagination.
Once we finished our drinks and marveled at how frickin’ weird W hotels are, we headed toward home, stopping on a whim at our friendly neighborhood Kroger to buy some scratch-off lotto tickets. None of the $10 worth of tickets we bought was a winner, alas. I’m gonna start playing our lucky/magic/sentimental numbers in the real lottery and see where that gets me…
But I digress. It’s hard to believe our amazing wedding was two years ago already, and that we’re, like, old married people. I was 26 when we got married! Now I’m almost 29!
Where does the time go? I have no idea, but I’m glad I get to spend most of mine with this guy.
Since today would have been my maternal grandfather’s 91st birthday, I’ve bumped this week’s Old-Timey Tuesday, which is drawn from the Abernathy archive, to Wednesday. When we were in Tennessee over Memorial Day for a family feed, my mom and her brothers were given a shoebox full of letters and photos from their parents that their cousins found while cleaning out their late parents’ home. It’s another goldmine, of course. The coolest find is the letter Grandpa Fred wrote to his mother sharing news of his engagement. Below are scans of the pages and the text of the letter. It’s pretty much the best thing ever.
Sept. 15, 1946
Dear Mother,
As I told you when I called today, I’m now engaged. Her name is Jean Reeves. She’s twenty years old, 5 ft 1¾ inches tall, weighs 101 lbs., brown hair, brown eyes, and a beautiful smile. I took some pictures today and will send those along as soon as they’re developed.
Her home is Taylors, S.C., about 8 miles from Greenville, S.C. Her father works in a textile mill there. She has one brother, younger than she is. She graduated from Winthrop College last June and came to work here on June 24. I met her a couple of weeks later but didn’t start dating her until Aug. 14. Since that time I’ve seen an awful lot of her. She rides to and from work with me and we eat breakfast out at the cafeteria every day.
We got along wonderfully right from the start and last Friday night [things] came to a head. I haven’t gotten her ring yet, but she’s wearing my pin, which means just as much to me as a ring. Guess those are the main facts about her. I know you’ll have a million more questions, and I’ll try to answer them as soon as I can. No definite date has been set for the wedding as yet and won’t be until we can find a place to live. That’s going to be a problem since there’s still a housing shortage around here.
I hope we’ll be able to get married on my vacation and if we do, we’ll come to Oklahoma on our honeymoon. We’re going to Greenville next weekend to meet her family. Wish you were close enough so I could bring Jean home some weekend. She’s a wonderful person, and I know you’ll like her very much.
A few more facts about her — She’s a Methodist, too; she is the secretary to the asst. division supt of my division. However, her office is quite a distance from mine. Dal and all the rest of my friends here approve of Jean very highly, and she’ll fit into the bunch wonderfully. Guess the most important thing is that I love her very much and she loves me. We both have about the same likes and dislikes, the same tastes in food, clothes, and recreation. I wish so much that Daddy was still alive so he could know her. I know he’d approve very highly. I hope you can be here for the wedding, but if you can’t, we’ll be home right after it. I’ll let you know as soon as the date is set.
I know you’re going to [be] real proud of me for picking a girl like Jean, Mother, after you get to know her. Guess that’s about all for right now. Any questions you want to know, fire away, and I’ll answer them the best I can. Give Frank my congratulations on pledging. I’ll write him as soon as I can.
Your loving son,
Fred.
Posted in family, love, nostalgia, Old-Timey Tuesday, social graces, weddings
Atlanta, Georgia, May 22, 2010
Today marks two years since we got hitched. Two years! Noots! In honor of this momentous occasion, I borrowed an idea from Matt Miller of Our Labor of Love and made a video of all 600+ Smilebooth photos compressed into about three minutes. It’s kinda super awesome. Please enjoy my hilarious friends and family:
all photos copyright Our Labor of LoveSince it’s finally the weekend and I’m going to some fun graduation parties tonight, I wanted to share a killer party photo from my friend Allison’s wedding in December. Our gang definitely knows how to get down, and we always bring along our beer-bottle microphones in case of awesome ’80s rock:
Most triumphant! And it gets better. When Allison sent me this, I immediately thought of another dance-floor shot: one from my wedding, of Allison:
Those are some super-fun parties, right? We are nothing if not passionate air-musicians. However, far and away the best part of these photos, taken a year and a half apart on different sides of the country, has got to be Shane, the dude rocking out in the background at left in both pictures. Beer in the same hand, sleeves unbuttoned and sorta rolled up, eyes closed and all-out singing along — and I’m pretty sure that’s the same tie. I damn near died laughing when I noticed this. Does this guy know how to party or what?!
Posted in friends, HUZZAH, observations, photography, ROCK, social graces, weddings
[Oops! Forgot to publish this one on Friday...]
Last night my favorite shop, Young Blood Gallery & Boutique, hosted an event with Meg Keene of A Practical Wedding, the blog and now the book. While I’m not a daily reader of A Practical Wedding (as I write this I have 54 unread APW posts in my Google reader… so very behind on so many things), I am a frequent one, and I was interested to go and hear her speak — and, yes, to buy her book. I figure I’ll feed my interest in weddings for the moment, and I’ll lend it and One Perfect Day out to my marrying friends in the future.
As it happened, the event had very little to do with weddings at all, beyond Meg’s initial spiel about how odd it was that this book hadn’t been written already. The rest of her remarks and the subsequent discussion were focused on female entrepreneurship. It made sense, I guess; most folks there were already married.
There was, however, one question from the crowd about submitting weddings to be featured on APW. A theme that ran throughout Meg’s response was that you shouldn’t write about your wedding with the sole purpose of landing yourself a feature on a popular blog like APW. You should write about your wedding for you, for any number of reasons: to chronicle the process; to stay organized; to recollect; to ease the transition from single to engaged to married; the list goes on. (I wish I had written down whatever Meg actually said — I’m certain it was more concise than that.)
I kept a wedding blog from about 11 months out from the big day on. It’s already been interesting to look back over what I wrote and remember what life felt like or what was going on at any given stage in the process. I’ve never been big on keeping journals, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve found myself writing about significant travels or transitions so I can recall them with some detail later. In addition to serving as a memory aid, my blog was a repository for ideas and a way to keep myself sane. (I also like to think of it as a resource for Google-happy Atlanta brides.) Some of my friends and family followed along; many did not. I never shared the link on Facebook because I didn’t want the random people I’m friends with all up in my business for the sake of more page views; It may also have been a teeny bit because I didn’t want my coworkers to get wise to the fact that I was planning my wedding and blogging about it from my desk. Ha!
The other recommendation Meg had that I really liked was to write about your wedding (for yourself) before you get the photos back from your photographer. Sift through your own memories while you wait, because, lovely and intimate as they can be, the images will only tell the story of your wedding from an observer’s creative perspective and can color what or how you remember once you’ve got a disc of photos to click through. Write down the things that stood out in your mind from the day so you can hang onto them over the years. (I’m sure it helps put the photos in context when you look back, too.) Even if you don’t fancy yourself the writing type, this seems like a worthwhile exercise. I hadn’t thought of it in these terms before, because it was something I was doing anyway.
I haven’t cracked the book yet, but I’ll be interested to see how it differs from the website. Have any of you out there read it? Thoughts?
Posted in deep thoughts, grown-up stuff, weddings
Durham, North Carolina, September 2008
I had to post this one today in honor of this past weekend’s events. When my alma mater came to a neighboring state to kick some Blue Devil ass on the gridiron back in ’08, I made plans with my college buddy Caroline to come stay with her (she was living and working in Durham at the time) and go to the official alumni tailgate and football game. That weekend, her new-to-me boyfriend of several months, John, also an NU alum, came down from DC to visit and catch the game as well. Nearly three years later, these two are hitched! Congratulations and U Rah Rah to the newlyweds!
Posted in nerdery, Old-Timey Tuesday, weddings
