Justin and Michelle

We went to Utah at the end of January to be there for my very youngest brother Justin's wedding.  Justin is the youngest of us seven Smith kids, and somehow he managed to come away from that experience (i.e. my bossing everyone around for a good portion of their memorable childhood) an upbeat, happy, friendly, and charming guy who genuinely seems to like everyone and every situation that he's in.  There are plenty of times that he can be on the goofy side, and he has a real ability for losing/misplacing/forgetting/accidentally destroying items like coats and bicycles and laptops and skiis and four-wheelers (and more upsetting is how he has managed to pass those exact qualities on to Max), and so we're all wondering how he convinced a beautiful, with-it, talented, driven, and charismatic woman like Michelle to marry him.  But she sure looked happy enough, so she must know something that we all don't.  Or maybe it's that she sees the Justin that we don't give him enough credit for. 

When I got married, Justin was only 11 years old.  He came to our wedding in a borrowed suit coat looking a couple of sizes too big for him on his stork-like frame, and he was very much still the eager little boy who would cry tears of joy when he received a Nintendo 64 the following Christmas.  Not so long ago Max and Olivia were looking through my wedding photo album and Max asks me, where's Justin?  When I point him out, Max is shocked because "Dad is taller than uncle Justin!"  And since I moved away from Utah only days after my wedding, in lots of ways Justin is still frozen in my memory as that little boy.

A couple of summers ago while our family was on the way home from a beach vacation in Cape Cod we decided to take a small detour through central Connecticut and surprise Justin who was then serving his mission there.  We planned our trip so that we could spend the night near the city he was in and then go to church in the ward where he was assigned the following Sunday morning.  That Sunday morning when we pulled into the church parking lot, there he was, now 6'5" tall, still somewhat stork-like, but with his huge smile and his huge Polynesian companion, out waiving to welcome everyone in.  One look at him waiving at us as merely an unfamiliar car that needed to be welcomed to church, and you could see that he was happy.   To see him out there doing what he was doing, and so incredibly happy about doing it, and there because he wanted to be, not because he knew that family members were checking in on him, was an ineffable experience in understanding the person that he had grown up to become.

So it was my pleasure to be there to see that same overjoyed smile as he got married.  And besides all of that, they were such an adorable couple.  Wow, they were cute.  I'm pretty sure that Adam and I were never considered adorable.  It was such a great day I say let's do it again next year. Well, not really....but I think that you know what I mean.  We love you.  Congratulations!