Thos and Delaina's wedding day, part 2: On temple grounds
Tuesday, October 19, 2010 at 7:13PM 
Before I continue, I must apologize for the many omissions I am about to make. I met a good many people on the day that Thos married Delaina and I was also extremely tired. Hence, most, if not all, of those names have simply flown out of my head. I could try to contact Thos and Delaina, run the pictures by them and have them supply all the missing names, but they are honeymooning in Vermont and I am certain that they are busy admiring the fall colors and do not wish to be interrupted by me and my questions.
So, except for my immediate blood family members, I am just not going to name all these people, including Delaina's beautiful little niece.
This is beautiful Delaina, my new niece-in-law and her beautiful little niece.
As I mentioned in my last post, I, a constant photographer, had to restrain myself and hold back, as Thos and Delaina had hired a real wedding photographer. If anyone should wonder if I was at all offended not to have been asked to shoot the wedding day... no, no, no!
I was glad they had a photographer. Very glad.
They will be glad, too, because they will get their pictures a lot faster than they would if I had shot them.
Anyway, here they are with their photographer, who was a dedicated and hard worker. I have no doubt at all that she did an excellent job.
There will be no polar bears in her pictures, but that is okay.
Polar bears would not be happy in Utah.
They just wouldn't be.
Utah is not a polar bear place. That is why I never want to live there again.
Once you have lived in state where polar bears roam, no other state can quite hold up.
Thos and Delaina, posing for their photographer.
Now, they do a pose for me.
Might I add that this Thos is a very special young man. If it were not so, I would not have traveled all the way to Utah from Alaska to be present outside the Draper Temple on the day of his wedding. My impression of Delaina is that she is special as well. I know she has chosen well.
They look good together.
I hope that they both live to be very old and that they are together through all that time.
In the Mormon faith, the purpose of temple marriage is to wed your spouse not until death do you part, but for all time and eternity.
I do not know about eternity, but if such a thing is possible, then I hope their love will bind them through it.
I hope the same for non-Mormon couples who love each other as well.
Even though I am not a wedding photographer, every now and then I find myself photographing a wedding. Not always, but most often, there comes that exciting moment when I must photograph the groom removing the garter from the leg of the bride.
I do not expect to see such a thing in connection with a Mormon wedding, and so I was bit surprised when I saw the bride begin to hike up her gown for the photographer - but it was so she could photograph her red shoes.
Red shoes also have a reputation as being a bit sexy.
But who says a Mormon bride can't be sexy?
Margie was a Mormon bride and she was sexy - oh, my goodness!
Was she sexy!
That's why we wound up with all these kids.
A little dog came running by.
It was a righteous and holy dog.
Sorry. I couldn't resist.
Thos gets a hug from his stepdad, Gregory Hayes, husband to my sister.
My sister Mary Ann hugs her new daughter-in-law. My niece, Shaela Ann Cook, who sometimes leaves comments on this blog, looks on from the left. Looking on from the right is Tom Swallow, Mary Ann's first husband and the father of all four of her children.
Soon, the photographer was lining all of the family members present together for a group picture, the bride's family on one side and us of the groom's on the other.
You can see that I am standing very close to my former brother-in-law, Tom. Over the past few decades, I have had to give great thought to just what defines a family. It first happened after my brother, Ron, died in 1987. His divorce had been a painful one, but his ex-wife came and despite all the pain of the past, she came as family.
As the mother of my nieces by Ron, she was family. The first wife of my older brother, Mac, also came. Their marriage had also come to a bitter end, but at the funeral it was, once again, as though she were still an integral part of the family.
I will be honest, when Tom and Mary Ann split up, my feelings toward him were made hard and they stayed hard for a long time.
Then, Shaela got married and there Tom was, as family, in the midst of family. It was his place to be there and so those hard feelings had to be put aside. Next, my father lay dying and Tom was there again. Again, it was the right place for him to be and his presence was appreciated.
Next was Khena's wedding in India, and we did some touring together - Tom, I and several others.
And now here we are together again, at Thos's wedding.
He is no longer my in-law, yet, he is family, bound to me through my sister's children. Twenty years ago, I would not have believed it possible, yet I find I now feel a certain sense of love toward him. When we parted company at the end of this trip, we hugged. It was a real hug, with love in it.
Finally, the wedding photographer had us all posed as she wanted. I let my camera hang useless as she took her pictures of the unification of our once separate families.
When she finished, I told everybody to stay put for just a moment, so that I could take a picture of the family group - absent myself, of course.
As I did so, the wedding photographer studied the situation and suddenly decided that she, too, liked the scene without me in it and so stepped back in (see lower right) and again shot the family group - absent me.
If you look at the bigger picture in the slide show, you will see that some eyes are looking at my camera and some at the real wedding photographer's camera.
I don't mind such a dichotomy in my photos, but I did not think that she would want it, so I quickly stepped aside, as quickly as was feasible, anyway.
Thos and his three sisters, Amber, Khena and Shaela. Amber hates to be photographed and has been known to take extreme measures to avoid the camera lens. I was the official photographer for Shaela and husband Steve Cook and Amber was part of the bridal entourage, and so she had to yield and I got some wonderful pictures of her.
I might also note that my sister's children are all brilliant. If you were to drop them in amidst the honor classes of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT - any damn place - and pull together the four other brightest people present and put them in a group, these four right here would still be the brightest quartet in the room.
I won't elaborate now, but maybe I will sometime in the future, should my time and travels allow.
I tell them I am done with this picture. They step away. I take another. I like to do things like this, to get the scene just when the pose has been broken.
;)
In my last post, I used a picture of the bride and groom that I shot at this very spot, just seconds apart from this one. In that one, they were standing slightly apart, so that the picture would show the words engraved in the granite behind and above them.
So I figured that I had better use this one now, so readers can see that they are not stand-a-parts, but rather a genuine, loving, hugging, couple of newlyweds.
And here they are, loving each other some more.
And this was my first glimpse ever of my youngest niece, Ada Lakshmi Iyer, held in the arms of her father, Vivek. She had been sleeping and so Vivek had stayed in the car with her.
Ada Lakshmi, in the midst of all.
Ada grew irritated and began to cry. Her dad showed her something on his iPhone and she calmed down.
Then Vivek took Ada off to the side of the temple and pointed out something above. I can't be certain, but I suspect that it was the golden statue of the Angel Moroni.
This is my brother Rex, the eldest of the two twins and also of all five of us original siblings. He is an insurance investigator and some little disaster had happened that he was called to early in the morning, about 7:30. He thought that he would be able to get it taken care of quickly and then join us at the appointed time, but he was wrong.
He did not arrive until after the photographer had taken all of her temple pictures, until after the bride had changed out of her gown.
Things often happen this way for my brother, Rex.
Now that Rex has arrived, we all leave the temple grounds and head back to our cars. As we do, I think of my trips to India and the temples that we saw there. One of those temples, dedicated to the Hindu God Ganesha, is located less than a block away from the home where Vivek comes from.
Just like this building, it is a temple, but the two places could not be more different. There is an elephant at that temple and if you give it a banana or a coin, it will raise its trunk, lay it upon your head and give you a blessing. The walls are covered with many brightly painted statues and in the evening monkeys leap about among them.
You must walk through a gantlet of beggars to get that temple. It is not in me to ignore and shun them, but it is hard to give to all.
The first time I went to that temple, I was very nervous. I feared that I would not be welcome, that nobody would want me there and I would not be allowed to enter.
I was wrong. I was asked to leave my shoes outside and then I was very welcome inside (as was any money I might care to leave behind). Their holy men blessed me in their way and although I did not understand it, I appreciated it and it felt good to me.
I really liked it when the elephant blessed me. That felt good.
In essence, although neither group may recognize it and some might get angry at me for saying so, the people at both temples are striving to do the same thing - to find their way through a hard and puzzling life into a good death, a death that isn't death.
Now that the temple part was over, there were three more functions to take place on this wedding day: lunch, a post-wedding ring ceremony held for the benefit of those who could not enter the temple, and a reception.
It is now 6:55 PM. I will try to get it all blogged, one way or another, before I go to bed, so that I can move this blog along and return it to Wasilla.
Update: After reading this, my niece, Shaela, posted a picture of me receiving a blessing from a holy man at a temple in Shravanebelagola on her own blog.
Reader Comments (8)
Well, many things made me cry. Not least among them was my husband hugging my son.
Amazing.
Bill, I loved this following part:
Polar bears would not be happy in Utah.
They just wouldn't be.
Utah is not a polar bear place. That is why I never want to live there again.
Once you have lived in state where polar bears roam, no other state can quite hold up.
I spent almost two years in Utah and feel much the same..... Saw the grizzly & polar bear orphans @ the Anchorage zoo. See:
http://www.washington.edu/burkemuseum/polarbear/large/anchorage_zoo.jpg
Aaah! Nice to see everyone together. I am very glad to see Thomas in the picture. Every evening I get back home and think about everyone, and often I think of him and his health. It is so nice that you capture life.I have no words to describe how glad I am to visit your blog
wonderful pictures, i wish them all the best
I think I've read this post three times now. This and the last one...they're both just lovely. You've captured something that, no matter how true, is difficult to express without sounding trite - that even in this modern world in which people move and travel around the globe, families still provide the foundation, the anchor for our lives. Blood and legal relationships matter little compared to the support, comfort, and common history that families provide. Thanks again for sharing with us.
My beautiful sister, Khena, stated my feelings perfectly on this entry. I couldn't agree with her more.
While reading this, I couldn't help but remember a photo I took of you in India. I decided to make it my blog entry today. I hope you don't mind.
Bill ,enjoyed your pictures and story. I would have loved to have been there and in a way through your pictures and writings felt that I was there, Thank you so much. I know Mom and Dad would have been very pleased and proud of Thos as I am.
Finally back at work, so I finally have time to waste on the Internet again. :)
I've enjoyed the blog posts about my wedding, and I am very very happy that you were able to come -- I wish I could have spent more time with you and everyone else who came, but I guess that's how these types of things sometimes go.
Anyway, I did want to say that I was originally going to ask you to photograph the wedding, even though you aren't a wedding photographer. However, when I told you the wedding date, your dismay at the proximity of the date to other projects you were (and perhaps still are) working on made me think you might not be able to come at all, let alone photograph it. So, I simply invited you as family and spent a couple of weeks trying to find a local photographer instead. By the time I knew you were actually coming, it was too late to change anything.
I'm glad you were able to come! Now I really DO need to make an effort to get up to Alaska to visit you and your family. :)