“How long have you been married?” a friend asked, just after a recent anniversary. “Forty-seven years,” I responded, tossing out the number uppermost in my cognitive surface.
All that year, I answered that question the same way. When our next anniversary showed up on the calendar, I took time to calculate. Forty-seven years. Really? Really? Seems I’d skipped #46 completely.
Our forty-seventh year ran for two years.
“On my gravestone,” I tell my friends, “put my age. Then add, ‘But don’t believe it. She never could be trusted with numbers.’”
After two years of believing we’d been married forty-seven years, #48 is upon us—I’ve done the math this time.
“Nana,” one of the grandbeans asked a few weeks ago. “When is your golden anniversary? We want to throw you a big party.”
“Aw, honey,” I told her “Not for a few years. But we don’t need a party. I don’t know who would even come!” Sweet girl. I love it that she wants a celebration. Fifty years is a significant milestone, after all. To youngsters, for whom even one month feels like a millennium sometimes, a half-century must seem an ice age.
Sometimes it seems that way to us too. After all, we Boomers are dinosaurs—or so some in subsequent generations think. Slow to catch on to societal trends. Quick to judge. Inflexible regarding changing views of gender, race, history and spirituality. Giants regarding our significant contributions to the world—but sleeping giants now. Once influential, now passe.
Some of that is true, I admit, as true and as perennial as every generation’s collective opinion of its elders. But regarding marriage, this dinosaur won’t budge. Like my fictitious dragon relatives, I’ll guard my cave of marital treasures with fierceness. They have increased over the years. Fidelity, companionship, mutual respect, honour—not to mention love, and what we’ve learned about that in our decades together. (Read 1 Corinthians 13 for a better understanding of love’s definition.)
No marriage is perfect, at least none I know. Some are highly toxic. Better ended. Most of us marry to get what we want. We chase that bare bone for years, instead of viewing marriage as (among other things) a God-given means to help each other become more of what he knows we can be, and what he can make of us together.
On August 21, 1976, I married an imperfect man who wed a highly flawed teenager, the pair of us covering up sins and battling acne. How we made it this far is due only to the unending grace and undeserved mercy of our Heavenly Father. He kept calling us back, and back, and back again. Through better and worse, richer and poorer, sickness and health. Our collected treasures are many, richest of all our beloved family. Piled beside decades of stories, our true family jewels, those treasures testify to what God can do with sinful but regularly forgiven people. Happy 48th anniversary, Hon.
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P.S. on this, the first day of #48, we celebrated with take-out breakfast, eaten in our van, on the shoulder of a prairie country road, between two bodies of water. Terns swooping, ducks diving, NO traffic on the gravel road except flies and butterflies. Hint, ladies: if you ever want to get your husband talking, ask this: “What creatures have you ever killed?” And follow up with the five ws of good reportage. I can’t remember what triggered it, but I laughed so hard at one point I could barely sit up straight. I think it had something to do with his claim that he ‘shot from the hip’. With a rifle, I asked. 10 feet long? He claims yes. Suffice it to say that my husband is not, and has never been, a hunter.
P.P.S. Don’t try to comment…I need to delete the comment option–haven’t figured out how yet. I’ve posted this on my FB page, so if you wish, you can say something (nice, I hope!) there.
Old pic, to match the vintage marriage.