Long Distance and Hypothetically speaking......to Solid Plans!
"We set up a trip for October 1, it was actually General Conference weekend. I flew up to the Bay Area to get to know him better, to spend time visiting with him. I flew up on Thursday afternoon and flew back on Monday night or Monday morning I can’t remember. Or I flew up Thursday night. We had a nice time visiting. He had arranged for me to stay with a family he knew, actually over in Pleasant Hill, the Manson family, very nice people, Ralph would drop me off there in the evenings I would spend the night and get up the next morning and get ready for the day and then Ralph would come pick me up. We would go out and do some exploring around San Francisco and around the Bay Area and just spent time together getting to know each other and find out yeah he’s a really good guy.
"We have a lot of things we have in common, it was easy to for me to talk to him. It seemed we had lots of things in common, we were both raised in larger families. He was the youngest of seven, I’m the second oldest of six. Education was very important to him, education was very important to me. We were both return missionaries, the gospel was very important to us, families are very important to us, we just had a lot of common values, a lot of common ideas, common core things we felt were important.
"Two weeks later, the middle of October, he flew down to Arizona to meet my parents and to spend some more time together; since his brother was right down there in Mesa he stayed there with him and we just spent some time together. It was great, at this point we kind of had a system where I would talk to him usually two or three times a week fortunately I worked for a long distance phone company so I had some free minutes.
"We would usually talk on Sunday night and Wednesday night that’s when we’d talk for a couple of hours and we wrote letters back and forth, this was before email, it was all snail mail, and get to know each other. He invited me to – Southern California – that’s where he had been living, he’d lived with his parents – He was born in San Diego, when he was two he moved to Salt Lake and then when he was about 10 they moved to Claremont California which is there in Southern California, east Los Angeles west up above the San Bernardino mountains.
"He invited me to Thanksgiving at his parents house. Kevin was going to be driving over with his girlfriend at the time and invited me to go and so I decided to do it. We left on, I think it was Wednesday morning to drive over the mountains, I got over there and met his parents, and the next morning Ralph flew in from Northern California. I was glad to see him. We had just – we enjoyed each others company, we had a good time together, nice time visiting.
"It was while we were that we had our “hypothetically speaking” conversation. And Ralph would ask me questions like, “Hypothetically speaking, if we were to get married, where we would we want to live?” “Hypothetically speaking, if we were to get married, when would you like to get married?” “Hypothetically speaking, where would you like to get married?” I was living in Mesa, he had Southern California where his parents were, he was working up in the Bay Area with a temple and of course we had lots and lots of family in Utah, so we could have gotten married at any number of temples and it would have been fine, there would be lots of people there. “Hypothetically speaking, where would we want to live?” Would he move down there, would I move up there? This is one of those conversations we had that time during Thanksgiving.
"After Thanksgiving I went back to Mesa with his brother and he went up to the Bay Area where he was working and we resumed our telephone conversations, and letter writing back and forth. At Christmas time he went to Southern California to spend Christmas day with his parents and the next day he was going to be flying over to Arizona to spend some time with his brother Kevin and me. When I had gotten back after Thanksgiving, people said, “Are you engaged yet?” “No.” But you know I knew that we had’ hypothetically speaking’ that is was kind of going in that direction and you know it was one of those things where I didn’t feel I had to say, “Heavenly Father is this the one?” I just felt very comfortable. I was saying my prayers, I was living the gospel, I felt guided that if there was something wrong I would feel it. And I didn’t. I felt we were very comfortable with each other, we had a lot of common values and that this was a really good guy. He was a return missionary, he was very respectful to me, he was a lot of fun to be around, he was hard-working, he was educated, he loved the Lord and serving him, and I thought this could be a very good situation.
"Ralph went over to Arizona on the day after Christmas, the 26th. We got engaged on December 28. He was there for about a week and we got engaged a day or two into it. We had gone to watch the sunsets there in Arizona, beautiful sunsets and we decided to go out to dinner together we went to TGI Friday. I drove my little car over to the temple grounds so that we could see the temple lights at night because the temple lights there at Mesa are so exquisite, just really pretty. You know over a 100,000 lights light up the temple grounds, it’s pretty impressive!
"We drove over them and sitting there, and he said, “Well, You know I kind of would like you to be my wife.” I said, “That would be nice.” He was laughing a lot all through dinner and I could tell something was coming because he was just so silly. He pulled out a ring and put it on my finger – we are sitting there in the car, watching the temple lights and all of a sudden the lights went off because it was I guess eleven o’clock at night and that’s when they turn them off.
"We’re sitting here and we’re talking in the car and in the process of getting engaged and a car pulls into the parking lot shinning a bright light on us, we’re just sitting there saying, “Hi, Hello”. So we got engaged so then we decided to go over and tell my parents, that woke them up, they were very happy for us, woke up my sister to tell her and then went to wake up Kevin Lambert to tell him, they was very excited for us. I was very excited for us, so he went over to his brother’s and I dropped him off at his brother’s house after we woke him up to tell him we were engaged and then left him there.
"The rest of the week we spent time talking together – you know making plans and talking about our future together and what we wanted to do and what we decided would – you know what we saw of our life together. We decided we would get married in April, originally we’d thought about sometime in the middle of April so that would give us three and a half months to get ready. The date we picked was April 16th, originally we’d done a different date but there were some conflicts so we moved it to April sixteenth, which was a Saturday there in Mesa, Arizona at the Temple there.
"We decided that would just be easier there for me to plan a reception there and then his mom wanted to do an Open House for us in Southern California, then we’d have just a little open house there in Northern California for some of his friends there, because he had been living there for several years working.
"We decided that because his job was much more secure than mine and very technical that I would be moving to California to live with him. That we would travel up, drive up there, I had a little car that I bought, little Honda Civic, great car that had air-conditioning and that our honeymoon would be driving up there.
"We continued to talk with each other a couple of times a week on the phone, I was sewing my wedding dress, my mom was sewing the dress for my sister that she was going to wear, she was my bridesmaid, his brother Kevin was his best man. We were keeping it really simple. By the time we got married I was 28 and he was 32, we were a little older, I hadn’t lived in Arizona very long only about a year and a half. We wanted to keep it simple, the important thing is we were getting married we were really excited, really happy, we had lots of family coming into town for us, it was great.
"I had enjoyed living there in Arizona. There are a lot of good LDS people, I liked the student ward there, I had been a Relief Society teacher there, I got to teach Spiritual Living once a month which was fabulous, it was like the die for calling to have. I sang in the ward choir, if they needed someone to play the organ I did that every once in awhile, I wasn’t there very long but it was okay. It worked out really, really well."
"One thing I forgot, I had, I think had flown one time up to see Ralph in February and then the plan was I wasn’t going to see him again until we got married. The company that I was working for Protocall, they threw me a surprise bridal shower one day it was ten days before the wedding on April 6th. It was at lunch time, and Bob Edwards who was the boss, his dad Bob senior had come down from Salt Lake and was living there for a while and was helping me with some stuff, training some of the people that there working at the company, so Bob senior had said, “Come on Lisa we’ve got to go do some stuff.” So he took me out of the office, I said, “I need to get back”, and he said, “oh no, we’ve got to go do this and we’ve got to do that.” And I said, “What are you talking about? I need to back to work, I’ve got things to do.” Because I knew I wasn’t going to be there too much longer with the company.
"And so we get back and he said, “Take this down to the conference room”, and so I walk in and everybody yelled, “Surprise!” Oh my gosh, everybody from the company was in there except these two for these two people out answering the phones, all the telemarketers were in there, my mom was there, she had gotten off work, my roommate Mona was there, it was just…..everybody was there. They had this big shower going on, “oh we have another surprise for you and they handed me a phone. It was a portable phone so it was like this big old long one with an antennae on it and it was Ralph! “Honey! Hi!” “How are you doing?” “It’s great!” And he says, “What’s going on?” “They’re giving me this bridal shower!” So he said, “Tell me what it looks like and whose doing it.” And then he said, “Oh turn around.” And I turned around, and he had been walking down the hallway while he was talking to me on the phone and they had flown him in to surprise me for the bridal shower because he’d been working at Long Beach again! I just lost it, I was crying and all the other ladies were saying, “Oh this is so sweet.”
"So he was there for the bridal shower and it was kind of fun to have him there. As soon as we were done with the bridal shower Bob gave me the rest of the afternoon off, he says, “I don’t think you are going to be worth anything, so just go!” We went and got our wedding license that afternoon, and that night some girls in the ward were giving me a bridal shower and so Ralph was there for that one too, so that was really kind of fun.” He had to fly back to work for a couple of days until he got back into town for the wedding on the 15th."
"One thing I forgot, I had, I think had flown one time up to see Ralph in February and then the plan was I wasn’t going to see him again until we got married. The company that I was working for Protocall, they threw me a surprise bridal shower one day it was ten days before the wedding on April 6th. It was at lunch time, and Bob Edwards who was the boss, his dad Bob senior had come down from Salt Lake and was living there for a while and was helping me with some stuff, training some of the people that there working at the company, so Bob senior had said, “Come on Lisa we’ve got to go do some stuff.” So he took me out of the office, I said, “I need to get back”, and he said, “oh no, we’ve got to go do this and we’ve got to do that.” And I said, “What are you talking about? I need to back to work, I’ve got things to do.” Because I knew I wasn’t going to be there too much longer with the company.
"And so we get back and he said, “Take this down to the conference room”, and so I walk in and everybody yelled, “Surprise!” Oh my gosh, everybody from the company was in there except these two for these two people out answering the phones, all the telemarketers were in there, my mom was there, she had gotten off work, my roommate Mona was there, it was just…..everybody was there. They had this big shower going on, “oh we have another surprise for you and they handed me a phone. It was a portable phone so it was like this big old long one with an antennae on it and it was Ralph! “Honey! Hi!” “How are you doing?” “It’s great!” And he says, “What’s going on?” “They’re giving me this bridal shower!” So he said, “Tell me what it looks like and whose doing it.” And then he said, “Oh turn around.” And I turned around, and he had been walking down the hallway while he was talking to me on the phone and they had flown him in to surprise me for the bridal shower because he’d been working at Long Beach again! I just lost it, I was crying and all the other ladies were saying, “Oh this is so sweet.”
"So he was there for the bridal shower and it was kind of fun to have him there. As soon as we were done with the bridal shower Bob gave me the rest of the afternoon off, he says, “I don’t think you are going to be worth anything, so just go!” We went and got our wedding license that afternoon, and that night some girls in the ward were giving me a bridal shower and so Ralph was there for that one too, so that was really kind of fun.” He had to fly back to work for a couple of days until he got back into town for the wedding on the 15th."
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