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Arriving at the temple
29 February 2008
The morning of Friday, 29 February, was as close as we got to disaster during our wedding. The prior evening had ended pleasantly enough—after dinner, we went our separate ways, Susan with Rebecca, Dustin with his buddies, for one last night out on the town as single people. (Dustin, Matt, and Matthew had ice cream on the Lower East Side; Susan and Rebecca got a Diet Coke at Duane Reade and selected jewelry.)
The morning, too, began smoothly. Then Matthew B., who had spent the night in Dustin’s awesome 39th-floor suite at the Doubletree Times Square and was now ironing the shirt in which Dustin would get married, noticed a problem: the iron had rusted, and faint brownish orange stains were rubbing off on to the shirt. Dustin called the hotel’s front desk to request a replacement iron, which, he was informed, should arrive shortly. But it never came. So Dustin ran down to Susan and Rebecca’s room and borrowed the iron there.
All of which made Dustin and Matthew late in meeting everyone in the hotel’s lobby. That meant that we all risked being late to the temple, which had requested that we arrive an hour early. So we made a mad, Home Alone-esque dash across Times Square. With the two of us in the lead and everyone else in tow, we made it to the subway in record time.
Then the unthinkable happened. The fare machines at that particular entrance to the Times Square-42 St subway station weren’t accepting credit or debit cards. Cash only. A problem for two people like us who never carry cash. The one thing we never thought would fail us—the subway—was now delaying our arrival at the temple.
Then Susan’s family realized something: they still had value on their MetroCards, and they could pass them back to us. It worked, and within moments we were happily speeding along on the 1 train under Broadway uptown to 66 St-Lincoln Center.
Dialann 