From Madrid to Heaven

This I can say to you, Dear Reader, is a story of love and marriage beyond the wonders that make of life a grand and incomprehensible mystery. Explain if you can, how a young, innocent Catholic girl in Madrid would become the wife of a naive, Protestant American traveler stopping-over in Madrid en route to Tehran, Iran. Explain if you can, how the Bishop of Madrid would condescend to grant a special dispensation for the first mixed Protestant-Catholic wedding to be held in a Catholic Church in Francos Spain in 1960. These matters can only be attributed to fate, chance, or the intervention of the Divine Hand. Nevertheless, those days and that adventure were as pure and fresh and exciting as only a youthful romantic can imagine. Those days I would like to hold on to. Those days I would like to tuck away in this book so that I can say: Look at our days, Dear Reader, days so bright and beautiful that I have kept to show to you so that you can see that we too loved life and treasured the moments that made up our days."