Yes, I know, it's been 8 months--oh, well

(I will catch up on those 8 months another time.)

I have been thinking all day about this date 42 years ago. On Saturday, November 4, 1967, I was baptized at the Pasadena Stake Center by my fiancee, and my best friend.
Three weeks earlier, on Sunday, October 15, (my 20th birthday) we were engaged outside the Los Angeles Temple. At the time, Dad said he wanted me to know he wanted to marry me whether I joined the Church or not.
The Saturday of my baptism was really hectic because we (UCLA) had a late afternoon home football game in the LA Coliseum. Because I was on the Rally Committee that set up all the half-time card stunts that meant going to the game first thing in the morning. Since we were going to have to leave early to get to the stake baptismal service by 7 pm, Dad came over to the dorm in the 55 Chevy to pick me up and go to his first Pac 10 game. I honestly don't remember who we were playing, but we left as the game was tied and had to listen to it in the car on the way back to Pasadena.
I think we must have won because I do remember being in a great mood.
The only one I knew at the service was Dad. Like all stake baptisms in California, there seemed to be dozens of children. I was the only adult. I was confirmed at the same service, and the blessing I received from my sweetheart was the most beautiful one I have ever heard. It was quite prophetic, too.
A year and a half later, after we had been married in the same Stake Center, become pregnant with Eddie, and were preparing to go to the LA temple to be sealed, I received my patriarchal blessing. In that, the patriarch in the Los Angeles Stake, whom I had never met before, pronounced some of the same words of promise and blessing on me that I had received at my confirmation. That was the strongest testimony to me that the Church was true that I had ever experienced.
And two years later those words came back to me as I drove through the night to the Memphis hospital where an ambulance had taken Dad after his hand accident. The comfort that my Heavenly Father had known what I was going to face years away from the first blessing (and other times since) sustained me during that difficult time.
I am so grateful for a young man who believed what he had learned and practiced in his own youth, and who shared that with me. We have had such a blessed life together, and the family we created is our greatest joy.