A Wedding in the Eye of the Storm

Dear family and friends,

     It had been a challenging time when the forces of nature prevented many of our loved ones and friends from celebrating our marriage with us. The calls and emails filled with sincere disappointment and sorrow came trickling in one by one, trying to hold on to the last minute praying for a miracle that Hurricane Irene would turn its course away from our location. We know many of you (including ourselves) have been waiting for this day for a long time, and had been wanting to celebrate right along with us and looking forward to an occasion that would bring many of us together at the same time.
     We had prepared, we had worked hard especially my new bride and my mom as they got this house and yard to be so beautiful. You should have seen my mom give the tent rental company the third degree on the phone when they asked to take the tent down 6pm instead of 8pm. Hurricane Irene was set to be one of the biggest wedding crashers ever. It rained a bit as we prepared for the big day. The storm watch and safety precautions took a bite out of our prep time and a bit of our morale.
     We finally had to let the inevitable set in, that our wedding, like many things in life, would not go as planned. The disappointment and the frustration sunk in. It is quite difficult to see your future wife struck by this disappointment after we had worked and prepared so hard and looked forward to this day. Yet after a few moments, being the trooper and example for me that she is, she got back up and back to being her cheerful resilient self.
     Around 60 of the 130 made it to the wedding. I was blessed to have the whole immediate family there. All of the extended family were not able to make it. Most of New York and New Jersey and any farther than that could not make it. Those who managed to make it had to either leave at 6pm or earlier or happened to be stranded with us. It was Hotel Toledo, the last resort. We even had Spaniards in the house.
     Needless to say the weather had tried to put quite a damper on the wedding yet it did not rain during the actual wedding. Somehow it turned out to be quite intimate, laid back, raw, surrendered, creative, honest, beautiful and absolutely wonderful with possibly more unexpected tears of happiness than raindrops! Even I got choked up.
     It was a bit unorganized, and leaned more on the intuitive side. A bunch of spur of the moment decisions and lot of calling audibles were made. We actually used the back of Joachim’s iPad as the tray for the rings. It had received some residue of the blessing of the rings. There were some nice surprises which I will talk about later at another time.
     The after party for the stranded was spent inside the house, which luckily had power. We had an impromptu clarinet performance by Skye. We also brought the PA system inside and sang Beatles, Nirvana, and others while playing guitars and clarinet. Grilled veggies and Kalbi (prepared by SR, Hyun Jeong and Ariel) from master chef Ganim gave us hearty sustenance, as we told jokes in Spanish. It was ridiculous. It was wonderful. Even that tropical storm that hit us was beautiful.
     Sung Ryen and I reflected on the whole event and realized despite the setbacks we loved the wedding, and had such a strangely very blessed moment. Love always prevails even in adversity and this wedding proved it to us. In regards to the disappointment of not having many of you with us, we are thinking of an idea, that someday, perhaps on the one-year anniversary, of having a potluck get together, an extended reception at some hall in the New York area. We will bring the PA that we bought, and do perhaps some “reenactments”, who knows.
     I will be putting up some of the pictures and media on this blog to give you a chance to see and share in our raw-dramatic-under extreme hurricane threat-reversal of disappointment-wonderful marriage :)

Thanks to you all for getting us here.

With sincere love and thanks to all,


Ian & Sung Ryen