50 Years of Love

Who gets married in August? A state like Louisiana has three seasons – Summer, July, and August. Who would seriously consider getting married in August, the hottest month of the year? 

We did. And we did more than consider it. We actually were married in August.

 

August, 1973. The Vietnam War was ongoing. Vice President Spiro Agnew had been notified about an investigation involving bribery and kickbacks. The price freeze that had been in effect (trying to stop inflation in 1970 when it was approaching three percent) was ended by President Nixon; the prime lending rate had reached 9.5 percent (and it would go a lot higher). On the 15^th, Nixon gave a nationally televised address on Watergate, addressing the growing scandal for the first time. Willy Mays hit the final home run of his career. William Rogers resigned as Secretary of State, succeeded by Henry Kissinger. Letter bombs were going off at department stores in London and the British embassy in Washington, D.C. Members of the Union of Soviet Writers published a letter in Pravda condemning writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and physicist Andrei Sakharov.

 

Top songs of that Summer of 1973: My Love by Paul McCartney and Wings; Yesterday Once More by The Carpenters; Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown by Jim Croce; Touch Me in the Morning by Diana Ross; Live and Let Die by Paul McCartney and Wings; Delta Dawn by Helen Reddy; Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree by Tony Orlando and Dawn; and You Are the Sunshine of My Life by Stevie Wonder. 

 

Two young adults – very young adults – were married on the 25^th. The setting was Mildred Crowe Baptist Church, a red brick building on North Market Street in Shreveport. The church has gone through a few permutations since then, but it’s still there, and while it’s no longer Baptist, it’s still a church.

 

The wedding was at 6 p.m. The service and the reception in the church hall had to be done by 7, because a revival service was starting at 7:30. Two fraternity brothers served as my best man and groomsman; my soon-to-be-wife Janet had a cousin for matron of honor and a close friend from college as a bridesmaid. Janet would, in turn, be a bridesmaid in her friend’s wedding a few years later, and they have remained good friends for more than half a century now.

 

We were too broke to afford a honeymoon. We had a few days off, and then both of us went to work at the Beaumont (Texas) Enterprise. I had been there since graduation in May; Janet joined after we were married. 

 

Less than two months later, the Yom Kippur War erupted in the Mideast, introducing Americans (including us) to gasoline shortages. Inflation took off in the 1970s, reaching 11 and 12 percent and higher for some things. Another embargo happened in 1979, with the Iranian Revolution and the storming of the U.S. embassy.

 

In the intervening years, we’ve experienced economic downturns, recessions, stock market crashes, crazy places to work, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and cultural and social upheaval. We had two sons, and we have the blessing of both living close by. We have three grandsons and a daughter-in-law we adore, and a girlfriend we thrilled about. We have a good place we are thankful to call our church home.

 

We have been blessed these 50 years together. I wouldn’t change a thing, even if I had to power to do it, and I would do it all over again. 

 

Related:

 

I Have Loved You All Along – poem by James Sale at Society of Classical Poets.

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Marriage

My wife and I had a not typical dating relationship and romance. We met during my last semester at college, and within three weeks were talking about getting married. I had the “talk” with her father in Shreveport, but wisely waited until the evening’s televised baseball game was over. I proposed to her while we were driving from Shreveport back to Baton Rouge, and I believe were about 30 miles from the LSU campus, somewhere in the Atchafalaya River Basin, when I officially asker her (she said yes).

I graduated in May and left the next day for Beaumont, Texas, to start my job as a copy editor on the Beaumont Enterprise. She returned to Shreveport to do a summer internship at the Shreveport Times. We saw each other several times that summer (Shreveport was about a five-hour drive from Beaumont), and then got married in August at a church neither of us attended. Pre-marriage counseling might have been around at the time but it wasn’t common.

We were married on a Saturday, returned to Beaumont on Sunday, and then both of us went to work at the newspaper on Monday (a two-journalist family).

We were young (she was 21 and I turned 22 two weeks after we were married). We didn’t know any better. All we knew was that we loved each other.

All of us bring stuff into marriage – personal history, lots of “baggage,” lots of expectations, a bunch of advice, and two starry-eyed kids.

Most of the advice you ignore, and, to be honest about it, most of the advice is useless. Marriage is one of those things that you can’t really explain completely to someone considering it. Some things have to be experienced. Once you have children, you can (and will) be a model for marriage – and that’s all the good and bad stuff combined.

There is one thing I wish someone had told me about marriage, but I most likely would have nodded like I understood and went on about my business. That one thing, though, is something critical, something hinted at in the wedding vows but never explicitly stated.

That one thing is this: marriage is not about me.

It’s not about my desires and wants. It’s not about my needs being met. It’s not about my “happiness.” (It’s not about anyone’s “happiness.”) It’s not about “romance,” although romance can play a facilitating role.

Marriage is about two things, one practical and one spiritual.

The practical point of marriage is family – providing a structure (even if we manage to screw it up) for the creation and upbringing of children.

The spiritual point of marriage is that great mystery – the symbol for Christ and the church.

It’s about “us” – a new creation, a oneness. We have a earthly purpose – family – and a spiritual purpose – to be (however imperfectly) and to reflect Christ’s love for the church.

But it’s not about me.


To read more posts on “what I wish someone had told me about marriage,” please visit Bonnie Gray at Faith Barista.

Photograph: Cheers by Jeff Klisares via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.