My wife and I celebrate 21 years of marriage today, but our wedded bliss had a stormy start. It was 1991 - the year the Tallahatchie and Yocona rivers kept overflowing Highway 7 again and again - and May 25 was as rainy as most days that spring.

Neither of us could be accused of marrying for money, so it was natural that the video of our wedding was also a gift from a friend who regularly took moving pictures as part of his profession. And we never let it bother us one bit that he was a livestock broker, and most of his videography subjects were Angus and Hereford cattle.

Even today, that video has highlights that make us cry and laugh. The tears come from all the faces in the audience that are no longer with us.

Sue had decided we would sing to each other during the ceremony, and for weeks we rehearsed. Every time, I'd forget my words.

They say your performance under stress reverts to the level of your training, but it wasn't so: Right there in front of God and everybody, Sue forgot her words, and I miraculously remembered, singing them for her until she was back on track.

The look on her face - first of terror, then relief - every time we watch our wedding is worth having undergone the ordeal.

Another ill-thought-out element was to have the ringbearer and flower girl remain with us during the ceremony, which was just a wee bit lengthy not just because of several musical pieces, but also because it was crammed with every romantic ritual Sue had adopted from the seven-foot-high stack of wedding magazines she had devoured during our engagement.

The flower flinger, being a girly girl, was mesmerized by the goings-on and would gladly have stood watching until she outgrew her specially decorated shoes.

Not so the ringbearer. The wedding lost its charm for him 3.7 seconds after it began. The video shows him squirming, sitting on the kneeling bench, looking longingly at the door, wordlessly asking his mama if he could sit down and then squirming some more.

During the minister's belabored prayer, the little boy tried to use the eyes-closed-and-heads-bowed situation to flee the scene.

The minister and the videographer each closed only one eye, though, and the close-up focus on the preacher's death grip on a wriggling wrist is the highlight of the video.

In the years since, Sue and I have endured and enjoyed, travailed and traveled, lost and loved, grown stronger and grown older.

We've learned to hold on just as tightly as the preacher did to the ringbearer. And it's a good thing he prayed such a long prayer: We've needed every word of it.

Errol Castens is the Daily Journal Oxford Bureau reporter. He can be contacted at errol.castens@journalinc.com.