Okay, a brief synopsis of my life from my last posting to this message.....I am happily married now....unbelievable! The wedding ceremony, though I had my misgivings about the amount of money that we spent, was absolutely beautiful. It made everything well worth the financial stress. I was looking about the church trying to see how many people showed up as they RSVP'ed, and how many "gate-crashers" were there. I saw all of my Groomsmen enter the church, and I had to note how absolutely beautiful my sisters looked upon entering the church. It was really something else....it was just unbelievable. I was looking over at my parents, and some of my friends who were sitting to my left, and I heard Renee's cousin start singing "You and I" by Stevie Wonder. I looked up, and that is when I saw Renee entering the church. To make a long story short I punked out.....LOL! The tears came up so quickly that I couldn't control them. It wasn't that I was nervous or scared or anything like that, I had just never seen her looking so beautiful...it was simply amazing. Renee was crying as she entered the church and seeing her emotional made it that much more difficult for me to keep a handle on things. The Ceremony was a blur, it is hard for me to specifically recall any certain event aside from when Karen sang her solo.....the tears came one more time....And then finally Father Norman said those words that I had been waiting a lifetime to hear. "You may kiss the bride." I tell you I kissed her and I felt the simultaneous thrill, and relief of kissing my brand new wife......The feeling was inexplicable. Then came the end of the ceremony, the presentation of the bride and groom, about one hundred thousand pictures, and then the reception. Renee and I danced the night away, did all of the obligatory wedding reception chores such as tossing out the garter and the bouquet, and before we knew it, it was time to retire for the night. We had the Honeymoon Suite reserved in the hotel, and it was so very comfortable. I am not trying to go into intimate detail, but there is no feeling in the world like being alone with your brand new wife for the very first time. I just can't describe the feeling. We spent the night in the hotel, woke up and had a joint-family breakfast and went back to our house for the gift opening. Later that day we drove to Louisville and had dinner at a Restaurant called "Ruth's Chris".....pricey no doubt...but sooooooo good. We checked into a hotel in Louisville and passed out for the night.....we woke up about 4:30 the next morning and caught a flight to Atlanta in preparation for our international flight to Jamaica........I just could not wait to get to the tropics.
Being an Officer...a Black one.....is sometimes hard. [Howard Rollins from "A Soldier's Story"] Sometimes being an Officer is difficult....not because of hard tasks, short timelines, or all of the worries involved in the care of your Soldier's, but the aura of professionalism and objectivity that you must display at all times. There have been many times that I have wanted to make a comment, yell, cuss at someone, or otherwise let my personal feelings be known about a subject, but unfortunately I could not because of my position. Let me tell you about two incidents that bothered me in particular. I was in Dallas Ft. Worth airport waiting to catch a flight on the last leg of my TDY trip to help a returning unit at Ft. Sill. As I went to my gate, I saw 4 Sailors in their black uniforms gathered at the gate...one was large and white, the other three were black. There was very little room, and many of them were standing intermingled with civilian airline passengers...
Comments