I don’t do social media, due to preferring not to enrich Zuck and the Woke Twits at Twitter, so when I want to indulge in an orgy of self-congratulation and narcissism that is the backbone of the digital bragging platforms, this blog becomes my tool.
Today I’m here to pat myself and the wife on the back for 42 years of marriage. Hooray for us.
More than four decades back, we piled into my 1967 Mustang fastback good-weather hobby vehicle, the same car I would use to bring son Anthony home from the hospital nearly two years later, and drove to Maryland to get married.
Afterward, we motored back to Johnstown and I went to work that night, just as I worked the evening that my son was born. The Gen X, Y, Z and Millennial types who can’t bring themselves to report to work – period – might want to consider that.
We have become a nation of the gutless, self-absorbed, oh-woe-is-me types whose preferred method of greeting adversity or unpleasant reality is to curl up in the fetal position and begin sucking thumbs vigorously.
Along that line, marriages have become disposable items of limited shelf life. How often we hear about couples breaking up because one member isn’t happy or needs to find themselves. They apparently enter marriage expecting a nonstop tour of Disney World and when the joy goes on hiatus, they want to, as one of my former sports editors used to say, split the blankets. Cut and run is another apt term.
Instead of I’m not happy, their excuse should be I’m not an adult.
Only children demand constant, instant gratification. They grow out of that, at least they used to do so, before the era of permissive parenting and outright enabling, coupled with societal programs to shield children from ever having to deal with unhappy reality, created never maturing progeny, with little of the benefit and all of the drawback.
How does one get to 42 years of marriage? One day at a time. It ain’t always Disney World, nor should it be.
There needs to be compatibility, not necessarily clone-like similarity, but common ground on the big issues – like spending money, fidelity, wanting children and grandchildren, belief in God.
This compatibility can be on display in curious ways. Today, for example, despite it being our anniversary, was pretty much an average day.
My wife took the two granddaughters we watch daily out to appliance shop and then to a playground. I went to mow my son’s lawn and on the way back, made a stop at a donut shop to get my wife some of her favored chocolate examples with chocolate icing.
In part as an homage to our wedding day, I broke out a Mustang – the ’67 fastback long ago was sold but this time it was my 2005 convertible – to make my rounds.
The granddaughters were eating lunch when I got back home. After they’d finished, the donuts were offered and cards were exchanged.
For at least the second time in the past three years, my wife and I had independently selected exactly the same card for each other.
This year it was a couple of dark blue and gold examples. On the front were champagne glasses with the words “Still do. Always will.”
We laughed and the granddaughters chuckled, too. They got an impromptu speech, the sort Poppy is fond of giving, telling them it all started on this date. Without the marriage, there would have been no daddy for them.
Without their daddy, they wouldn’t be here. They were more interested in flipping a penny and having it come up tails an inordinate number of times.
Come to think of it, that was a metaphor for the relative rarity of a 42-year marriage.
OK, this brag session is finished. Thanks for your indulgence.
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