It was the morning of my wedding: Friday, Aug. 31st, 2007. My bride-to-be called me early in the morning with a frantic request.
“Tom — I have something super important that I need you to do right now,” my bride, Sue, said to me on the phone at 7:30 am. “We need a pen for the wedding for the guest book!”
Good Lord! The wedding reception was less than 12 hours away and we needed a pen! But not just any pen. A special wedding pen that would be used for our guests to sign the wedding guest book at the reception hall.
For 8 months, we planned our wedding. We booked our hall, the church, photographer and videographer well in advance. We booked the limo, flowers, cake, and all of the other 40 things that go into planning the perfect wedding.
But just one item was left off the list – a PEN! Well, probably because we didn’t have a PEN to write it on the list!
Talking to my lovely bride on the phone the morning of the wedding, I asked the dumbest question a guy could ask a frantic woman on her wedding day: “Sue? Can’t we just use any pen? I mean, we have about two hundred in our pen drawer at home.”
Yes, we literally had a “pen drawer” in our kitchen where we had over 200 pens — blue ink, black ink, red, green, purple — even erasable ink.
“No Tom. We need a white wedding pen that goes in a pen holder,” Sue said.
Ohhh.
Us Neanderthal men don’t know anything about white wedding pens. A good ol’ Joe’s Auto Shop imprinted pen would’ve worked just fine.
But I had specific instructions from Sue: white wedding pen that fits in a holder, and frilly stuff around the edges and bottom. Ok I got this.
I thought of the the perfect store — Target. It must have some supernatural pen like that. My son, Justin, and I drove to the nearest Target store open at 8 am. Inside the store I walked up to a white wedding pen expert and she guided me to their aisle in the store, which had exactly ONE remaining white wedding pen – $8.99.
Man — that was easy!
The pen became the hero of the wedding and made it there safely. Guests were in awe of its radiance and beauty as they used it to sign their names on our guest book. The ink was made of 14k gold.
Sue and I glanced over at the pen — which we now called Pennie. We smiled at Pennie and thanked it for saving the day.
To this day, we still have Pennie in our house stored in a special cabinet with our wedding mementos. Pennie served an extraordinary purpose in the best day of our lives.
