On December 6, 1980 two young people headed for a stone chapel on the Darmouth College campus

[DFW]

45. Congratulations from one with a somewhat similar story.

I was in a Berlin cabaret in July, 1974, and a woman I had met the night before told me she leaving for China the next Day, but I "should meet her girlfriend from "up north." I said, sure, where is she? She leaned back, and I was confronted with a vision of beauty that literally took my breath away. I was far from the only guy there that was interested, but I was, for some reason, the one she gave her attention to. She had never met an American who spoke German before. We were both 22, and thank goodness for those college German classes! She spent most of 1978 with me in the Boston area, and I restructured my job so that I was (very) frequently in Europe. By 1981, we had been together for 7 years, but never found the time to arrange something as bureaucracy-heavy as a wedding. Luckily, my brother invited us to his wedding, which became our double wedding in northern Virginia in April, 1982. The event looked like the United Nations General Assembly, since our European friends came over, and my brother's wife was from Japan. We had it in a Unitarian church--neutral ground for my wife's Catholic parents, my sister-in-law's Shinto Buddhist family, and our atheist American parents.

Like you said--ordinary, but extraordinary. Of our daughters and their men, not one was born in the USA, but three out of the four are now US citizens, and of their children, all are dual citizens of Germany and the USA. When you have been together as long as you two have (or as we have), ordinary stories become extraordinary. My wife is from the flat farm country of northwestern Germany. When we met in that smoky cellar in Berlin in 1974, she never imagined that nearly 21 years later, I would be introducing her to the President and Vice-President on the United States. A far cry from milking cows, needless to say!

Every now and then, the stars align as they should. It sounds like they did for you, for sure! Enjoy the accomplishment!