RSVP
RSVP
On July 15, 1973, six weeks before I started law school, I attended an outdoor Sacrament Meeting at Wildwood in Provo Canyon. I had been invited to the meeting by a friend, with whom I had worked in student government at the University of Utah. The speakers at the meeting were the three members of the Days of ’47 Royalty for 1973.
A queen and two attendants were selected each year from the descendants of the Mormon pioneers as part of the celebra-tion of the arrival of the pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847. The first attendant in 1973 was Terri Fisher. I still have a vivid memory of seeing her at the podium that day as she spoke. Unlike the queen and the other attendant, Terri made a deep and lasting impression on me.
After the meeting, she and my date spoke for a few minutes, as they were cousins who had not seen each other for some time. However, my date made a point of not introducing me.
At the end of August 1973, as I finished my first week in law school, my good friend from Yale—Morris—invited me to come with him to Terri’s house so he could introduce me, as he wanted to line us up. Terri and Morris were good friends (but not in a romantic sense because Morris was engaged to Jane, who was serving a mission in Ecuador), as they had team taught a Gospel Doctrine Class the previous Spring.
At the time, I did not make the connection between the attendant I had seen at Wildwood and the Terri to whom Morris wanted to introduce me. I declined Morris’ offer because I had been suffering from strep throat all week and was anxious to go home to Salt Lake for the weekend to recuperate.
I did not actually meet Terri until October 21, 1973. I had come back from church that day to the small house I was renting with Morris, Judd, and Marlan, and decided to go to bed early. As I was praying by my bedside about getting married, a knock came at our door. It was Terri. She had come to visit Morris. When I heard her voice in the living room, I decided to get dressed and go see who was there.
I still remember the spiritual impression I had when I first saw Terri. She was dressed in a full-length pink dress with long sleeves, and her golden hair reached almost to her waist. Her radiance seemed to fill the room with light. I was fascinated by her and did everything I knew to impress her. I told Morris afterwards that I was going to marry her.
We dated several times in the next nine months, and Terri would stop by the house to visit Morris from time to time, but she told me in March 1974 that even though she found me attractive, she was not ready to fall in love, and, in April, that she just wanted to be friends.
However, things picked up when she came to Washington, D.C. in June 1974 to spend the summer there after her first full year of teaching elementary school. I was in D.C. doing my internship in Congressman Wayne Owens’ office, and, at her request, picked her up at the airport on June 12.
On June 14, I took Terri on a walking tour of the monuments on the Mall. As we sat on the grass at the base of the Washington Monument, Terri leaned over and kissed me. It was our first kiss. Later, at the Lincoln Memorial, I stood behind her with my arms around her as I read out loud the words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Speech, which I love.
Unfortunately, just as I was reaching the end of the speech, a pigeon high in the rafters of the monument dropped some poop on Terri's arm. We drove back to her apartment with Terri holding the arm that had been pooped on out the window.
I returned to Salt Lake on June 18 and Terri returned on August 22. We dated steadily through the Fall, but I broke up with her at the end of January 1975, only to then realize I had made a terrible mistake, and so came back to her at the end of February to ask forgiveness. We got engaged on March 14 and married on May 15, and, as of this writing, have been married almost 48 years.
I am still amazed that Terri agreed to marry me. She has been the great blessing of my life. She possesses a combination of two qualities to a degree that I have never encountered in any other person. She cares deeply about the welfare of other people, particularly those who have special challenges, or who are too often forgotten for other reasons, and she has the energy and drive to do something about it.
The number of people to whom she has ministered in myriad ways throughout our marriage is extraordinary. It can truly be said of Terri that her charity “never faileth.” I believe that the promise in my Patriarchal Blessing that I would be “known among men for my kindness and generosity” has been fulfilled largely through Terri’s amazing efforts to help other people, which I have tried my best to support.
