OUR! 65th! CHRISTMAS!
Our 62 years of marriage, two years of going together, and the Christmas coming in FOUR DAYS!! I can still do arithmetic!
For a couple of kids still “wet behind the ears” that is quite a record! Who says God doesn’t bless weddings on a Tuesday of your Senior Year of High School done by the Justice of the PEACE in Kiowa Colorado. When we ate our bag lunches, washed down with a can or two of Canada Dry ginger ale - The Champagne of ginger ale - that day by the side of the highway we ASKED GOD to be the GLUE in our marriage. He certainly did the job through thick and thin. The “D word” was never in our vocabulary; coping skills and wisdom were always provided. THANK YOU GOD!
Tom’s jobs with IBM and Amdahl entailed a LOT of traveling to fix computers all over the world. The saying used to be “join the ARMY and see the world!” Tom was part of the army of technicians popping in and out of airports – tool bag at the ready! Even the new computer systems required a bit of babysitting to make sure they were doing the job and the customer was completely satisfied; the bugs worked out of the hardware, the software, and the training of the customer’s operators complete!
Meanwhile, back at the home front, mom had to handle it, whatever IT was. Thank God for telephones and good neighbors! It seemed like when Tom was out of town Bill, the Navy P3 pilot, was available and when Bill was on assignment, Tom was handy to help Cathy with a repair or a mechanical problem. I kept busy with volunteering at the boy’s school, church, Christian Woman’s Club, taking care of Kathleen and some other children needing care, yard and car maintenance – only mowing and pool – and oil and water in the car! The rest would wait for Tom if Bill deemed the problem not an emergency.
It wasn’t until Tom’s Mom died in 2003 that his Dad finally asked WHY Tom and I eloped. We had stayed for a week or ten days at the farm in Yuma CO after Virginia died to help with the drastic change in Dad’s situation – sending out those notifications that the mortuary prints - and just providing a transition time. Dad had been a caregiver for several years as Mom was having small strokes and her hearing was not good; her memory was drastically affected by a stroke just a month before her death.
So Tom told him what was on our minds that fateful year - 1961; he LAUGHED out loud!! “Would you like to know the REAL STORY?” He proceeded, for the first time, to tell us of their courtship and marriage. THEN, we laughed!!
I said, “Is it too late to ask for an annulment?” It seems our marriage at the ripe old ages of 17 and 18 was because of a TOTAL misunderstanding of his parent’s situation prior to THEIR marriage. An eye-opening experience for sure as to how insufficient Tom’s knowledge of his parent’s lives as teenagers was to that very day. I couldn’t believe it took his DAD so many years to ask about what led us to elope since I was not pregnant!! Our son was born after OUR 5th Anniversary (thanks to the advent of birth control pills!)
Tom’s parents had celebrated 60 years of marriage before his Mom died. Marriage is all about COMMITMENT and patience, LOVE and especially TRUSTING GOD. I have often said that I “fell in LOVE” with my husband at least THREE times after we married…
