After Forty-Nine Years

Time has a way of changing one's thinking and perspective on many issues of life. For instance, marriage.

That six-year-old sage

"l'll never get married," I said to Mother when I was a six-year-old sage. Mother was too important to me. She just smiled.

"I'll never marry," I said as a high school know-it-all. Running track and tracking the Atlanta Braves (as bad as they were at the time) kept me too busy for that. Those were my prime interests.

"If I ever marry, it'll never be to a girl from the North," I proclaimed as my Southern roots began to become important to me in college and my aversion to matrimony began to fade.

But God has a way of turning our self-conceived ideas and plans on their head. In my case, He had a short, sweet little (and I do mean little!) coed pass me as I waited in line for breakfast at the dining common one morning of my first year of graduate school. The friend who was with me and I joked callously about her long overcoat, which reminded us of the one Schultz wore on Hogan's Heroes, and about her lack of height in contrast to the excessive height of her roommate, who was walking beside her. They were a female version of Mutt and Jeff.

Then my pal began daring (he might even have phrased it in the form of a "bet") me repeatedly to ask her for a date. We seemed to cross paths with her everywhere we went in the dining area--in the line to pick up our trays, in the line to receive our breakfast, on the way to pick up our drinks, in our efforts to find a table, and in the line to empty our trays when we'd finished eating. And every time we did, my friend dared me to ask her out.

Finally, just to shut him up, I accepted his challenge. I learned the girl's name and her dorm and asked her for lunch. Surprisingly, she accepted, and a few days later, we had lunch together. That's when I learned that she was from, of all places, not a Southern state but Pennsylvania! Despite that, I thought it was an enjoyable date and even considered asking her for another date sometime.

She apparently left that first date with a much different scheme in mind, and it went beyond an occasional casual date. She later confessed to me that she had returned to her dorm humming "I'm gettin' married in the mornin,'" the line from the song "Get Me to the Church on Time" in Lerner and Loewe's musical My Fair Lady.

The historic day when I ate my earlier words of committed bachelorhood

Her scheme overruled my tentative plans. That was more than fifty years ago, and we recently celebrated our forty-ninth wedding anniversary. My breakfast companion lost the bet, but I got the best, the bride, so I won on all counts, and I couldn't have asked for a better bride.

Connie reading to first graders in her first year of teaching

During the past forty-nine years, we've taught school together, she in lower elementary and I in junior high and high school. We've camped together, sleeping on roots in leaky canvas tents; reared four children together; and visited countless historic sites and battlefields. In fact, we spent part of our honeymoon at Valley Forge and on the battlefield at Gettysburg.

We've served in church, teaching at every level, from fidgety preschoolers to senior adults; weathered our children's health crises; and survived economic downturns together. We've hosted seventeen teenage girls in a house where they had to share one bathroom. We've helped organize and financed four weddings in two years. [My role in those was to show up, speak up ("Her mother and I do"), and pay up.] We've even waged occasional disagreements and arguments with each other, and both of us survived, kissed, and made up.

And we're still together as we've begun the journey through what many people refer to as the "golden years." But as we now look back over nearly half a century together, we both conclude that they have ALL been Golden Years!

After forty-nine years, we're more in love than ever. As the hymn says, "God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform."

Still together and loving it!