Beginnings

Oh, my word. That's my gorgeous wife. She's wearing a flannel shirt, not because she's trying to be cool, but because she's trying to get warm. There's a deflated air mattress over the picnic table--I'm quite sure it is. That's our two-man (one woman, one man) tent in the background; it folded up into a satchel only half as big as a sleeping bag. The box on the table held the camp stove--it was that new. So was everything else. We were newlyweds. Everything was brand new.

After an actual whirlwind courtship, we were married six months, no more, after our first date. When I look back on all that haste, I wouldn't have it any other way. Like great American adventurers, we were on our way west to a life we knew very little of. She'd signed a teaching contract at Phoenix Christian School, where the principal was an old high school teacher. I was enrolled at Arizona State University, Department of English, where I planned to get a masters degree and whatever else it took to somehow garner a teaching position in a college. That was the plan. In our case, it worked out.

I'd been accepted at ASU before my first date with her. In fact, I was committed to going to grad school when, a year before, I took a teaching job in southwest Wisconsin. I remember telling the administrator, a man named Batchelor, exactly that one day, like an idiot. He wasn't thrilled by the news, told me it was fortunate I hadn't told him that before. 

June 27, 1972, we were married in Orange City, Iowa, in Barbara's home church. For six weeks or so we lived in a little rental place in my hometown, Oostburg, Wisconsin, while I worked at Terry Andrea-John Michael Kohler State Park, as I had several summers before. Barbara got ready for the way west--we were off in early August.

We came heir to all kinds of things my mother tossed before moving to the Home--one of them was the picture up at the top of the page. Somewhere, I'm sure, we had one like it--along with this one, a spoof on Barbara's fear of snakes. See that smile?--and bare feet too, part of the set up.

When I think of it now, I can't help remembering that the whole deal was an adventure, the two of us, only recently married after six short months of courtship on little more than weekends. We were both teachers, under contract, and I didn't make the three-hour trip to Chicago's far south side every weekend either. I don't know if I'd want to tally how infrequently we'd dated, and Arizona was brand new, at least to me. Barbara had spent a summer teaching Bible school there with a mission program, but I'd applied to ASU during the fall of 1971 for only one reason--I'd never been to Arizona, and it sounded like an interesting place.

So off we went, the two of us, knowing, quite possibly, no more about each other as we did about Arizona. I know the picture at the top belonged to my parents because there's handwriting on the back--mine. 

And there lies another story. That little vial parked at the corner of the picnic table, beside the camp stove box, does more than suggest some constipation. I'm not surprised, given the inherent drama of all the changes. 

But I remember this too--that my new bride was not pleased with my opening my big mouth about her gastric system. I don't know if her chagrin became our first tiff--I doubt it; but I remember she wasn't pleased, just as, should she read this, she wouldn't be pleased with my bringing it up today again, a half-century later. 

She'd married someone who wanted to write. Even I wasn't sure what all of that meant; she certainly wasn't. She'd married someone who found all of life fascinating and loved--sometimes too much, I'm sure--of telling the world. 

Every marriage has its seams, its points of tension. We've had tiffs and tussles and long drawn sentences of silence, but I don't remember any of them. They're gone completely. It would be interesting to know if she'd say the same thing. If I know her--and I should after a half-century--I'd think she'd tell me there are moments she hasn't forgotten. 

I remember that vial, not because of constipation but because she was not entertained by my parents knowing their son's new wife needed a laxative, an obviously private matter I'd willfully made public.

All of that was a half-century ago. It's now a quarter past six. In less than an hour, I'll be back in bed, beside her. She'll only half acknowledge my presence. Her sleep, especially in the mornings, goes a significant distance into some deep blue sea. 

Some things don't change in a half century: defining what's public and what's not, and snuggling warm in the morning at some Colorado state park or living together in a house we built not all that long ago just outside of Alton, Iowa. 

Okay, maybe I shouldn't have said all of that this morning. If so, I'll probably find out soon enough.