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Posted on 02/14/2007 5:25:11 PM PST by STARWISE
You can bet the people taking part in today’s wedding ceremony for Bill Paisley and Lesa Zwicker are keeping an eye on the groom.
You see, more than 22 years ago, on a Saturday in late December, he was supposed to be standing at the altar to watch Lesa, his fiancee, walk up the aisle of a Mahone Bay church.
All the details had been attended to. The bride was to wear the same dress the groom’s mother had worn for her wedding. The food was being prepared, the 75 guests were starting to arrive in town, and the people of Mahone Bay were thrilled for their Lesa, about to marry a dashing young American naval aviator.
But, as she said this week, "It didn’t happen."
Instead, a day and a half before the ceremony, Paisley called it off. We’re too young, do we really know each other, I’ll be on an aircraft carrier for months at a time.
None the wiser, Paisley’s buddies showed up in town for the wedding, asking the way to the church and getting directions back to where they came from when it was learned which cold-footed wretch they were friends with.
"That was a pretty crappy day," said Zwicker, 45. "But I had a great stag party. It’s a legend in Bridgewater. Legend."
Zwicker was a student at Park View Education Centre when she and Paisley, at the time a student teacher, met and fell in love. She joined him as a student at Acadia University and they spent five years as a devoted couple.
The wedding proposal came while Paisley, who had joined the U.S. navy, was in flight school in Pensacola, and Zwicker travelled to Florida for a visit.
Four months later, after the December disaster, Paisley went back to flight school, eventually marrying and having two daughters. Zwicker returned to work at the phone company, never marrying, and that was that.
For more than 20 years.
Then last summer, Paisley, who is now 48 and divorced, was talking with an old friend about meeting up for the Wooden Boat Festival in Mahone Bay and cas-ually asked if she thought it would be a good idea for him to contact Zwicker.
"She e-mailed me and said ‘Oh my God! Just so you know, when you come down on the weekend, Bill Paisley might be here!’ She wondered if I would have a problem with that, but I said I thought I was finally ready to face the bastard," Zwicker said.
"I told her to give him my e-mail address at work, and my phone number at work, and to let him know that I would go to lunch with him. ‘I’ll give him an hour.’ "
He called the next day and, after a few e-mails back and forth, the two arranged to meet for lunch. Paisley got on a plane to Halifax, picked up a rental car and headed straight for Zwicker’s office.
They went to Point Pleasant Park and talked for two hours.
"There’d never really been any sort of satisfactory closure for me, and I don’t think a single day passed that he didn’t at least enter my mind for a second," said Zwicker. "When he came around the corner in the car and picked me up that day, and I got in the car, I knew. It’s amazing because I spent 22 years hating the guy, or telling myself I did. And when I saw him, I knew I didn’t, I didn’t at all. And it was the same thing for him."
Paisley, now a commander in the navy who has just completed a stint at the Pentagon, said the same day as that walk in the park he began to wonder if life might be giving him a second chance. Two months later, while Zwicker visited him in Virginia, he proposed, saying this week that he found proposing to the same woman for the second time, two decades later, extremely nerve-racking.
"A lot of that was because it was Lesa giving me a second chance which, above anything else, is just the most amazing thing and what makes her so special in a lot of ways," said Paisley. "I didn’t know when I asked her if she was going to say ‘Are you kidding me?’ or what the reaction was going to be. So it was much more nervous this time."
Paisley’s daughters are 18 and 14, so the couple will live in Virginia, but they think they’ll eventually move back to Nova Scotia.
The stones from the original engagement ring that Paisley bought in 1984 have been put in the wedding band that he’ll slip on Zwicker’s finger today at the ceremony in Tantallon. The band from the engagement ring has been embedded in the wedding ring he will wear.
"So we both get to have a piece of the original ring," said Zwicker. "I’m surer now than I was originally. We both are. There’s no doubt, no hesitation, there’s nothing that’s going to stop us from going forward. It’s for real this time."
Paisley said his only concern about the marriage is that life in the U.S., with two teenagers, will be a big adjustment for Zwicker, and his main goal is making his new wife’s new life as easy as possible.
"I say this only somewhat facetiously, but what Lesa wants, Lesa’s going to get," he said. "Getting her back in my life at this point in my life, the two words that come up are ‘lucky’ and ‘blessed.’ That’s what I am."
Thank you for the ping george.
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That's lovely devolve! I'm moving faster there, and you forgot your other colt!!
LOL!
A tricky one to put together
I can redo it with a bit larger size - lots of frames there
You did a beautiful job, as you always do!
'Tricky' graphics are what you are good at.
BTTT
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