48 Years and Counting

I get an electric kind of thrill when telling people about my parents' wedding day, because it is the kind of story that has inspired me and molded me to become the person I am.

It creates an image in my mind of the kind of people they are, defining their personalities in a way that brings me no small amount of pleasure. Like all images, it is of course tinted by my own viewpoint and muddled by separation of years and the confusion inherent in second-hand recitations of oft-heard histories, and my own understanding of the event is limited by how much information has actually been passed down.

No doubt I'm spreading all sorts of misrepresentations of the facts whenever I tell it, because my brain has never had the capability of retaining facts very well, only impressions.

But my impressions - my mental images of those two people who formed a union forty-eight years ago on the dry, dusty wasteland of West Texas - have remained throughout the years, not so much keyed on the moment-by-moment timeline of events as on the character of the two young people involved, their motivations and desires that shaped the future that has now become the past and present.

Oh, how I wish there were a motion-picture record of the entire episode - the courting, the building of the relationship, the assistance from friends and mentors who guided them along the way; even more so, a mental record of the thoughts and emotions that were going through their minds at the time, a self-described analysis of the decisions that were made at crucial points, the flow of things that brought them both to the point of saying, "Let's get married."

Sometimes I try to cast my mind back to my own courting days to remember what it was like to be the young bachelor at church looking over the beautiful young single ladies, debating their good points and not-so-goodpoints, wondering how on earth it would be possible to logically calculate the merits of one over the other, going out with this one or that one to find out what they were like, all the while wondering if I was in some way revealing too much about myself such that they might be too disgusted to tolerate my presence.

I wonder what it was like to be a young soldier out in the middle of nowhere, separated from family and friends, eagerly anticipating the gatherings at church or at people's homes to have the opportunity to spend an hour or two with one of those delightful young ladies...

And then to find one that one of them wanted to spend the rest of her life with me.

I admire them both for their ultimate practicality in handling the 'wedding' event. As mentioned, it has inspired me to have a great deal of respect for frugality and common sense, eschewing formality and ceremony. Whether that was truly their intent, or merely the proper way to handle things given the limitations of their current circumstances, doesn't really matter to me. What matters is that they didn't wait and drag the whole thing out just to have a fancy wedding. They had an opportunity and they took it as a matter of course. Simple, practical, efficient.

That's my parents.