Our 46th anniversary remembered

Forty-six years! Do you have any idea all that can take place in forty-six years? I started on this at 3:00 this afternoon, and with a few interruptions, I am just now getting around to completing it; it is 9:00 p.m. Lest there be any misunderstanding, there were not that many interruptions to prevent my working on it, just that I had an idea for which I was searching, and when I get my mind set, it is hard for me to let it go in another direction. In all of that,I never did get my Photoshop installed on here. Another time, I guess. Probably after this is published.

I did not plan ahead to do anything special about our anniversary here today, and now my mind is at work wondering what path to take. If you have been reading along with me, you will know that our Love for each other has developed a luminosity never before attained over these forty-six years. We were like most all young couples when we got married . . . very much in Love! For real. To the best of our ability to know what Love was all about. This new Love of which I speak, such as we had never before experienced comes from an accumulated depth gained from life's experiences you simply did not have as these two young people who only had eyes for each other. We believed we were untouchable. Trauma that brings with it anguish that one doesn't even think is bearable does not happen to "people like us." We had no worries in the world. All was right. We had Love for the answer to everything. We could do anything.

Jim was 22, and I was 19. Note: I was almost 20! Jim has said throughout all these years that his only mistake in life was marrying a teenager, and I just wanted to say I was not a teenager for very long after we married. He was quiet (as you can see, not all the time ;), somewhat reserved. Me? Pretty much the opposite. Jim did not have his first date until he was in the Air Force. He went to First Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, and was a part of the young adults there. Yes, with them, he was active, but his comfort zone that we talk about so much today, was drawn close. Me? It thrilled me to be first. The first to break away from "It's always been done this way," or if no one else has tried it, I wanted to try it just for that reason if no other - within the bounds of my beliefs and morals, though, but there is one thing I did that I'll never understand why I did it, and that was to enter the beauty pageant my Senior year in high school.

You do a lot of things that year simply because it IS your last year, and I think it is a sense of testing the waters after all the protection of the past four years in high school that was preparing you for facing the future. You take these little daring steps to see how you'll do when bit by bit, portions of the shroud is torn away for fleeting moments. Me? The beauty contest? Oh, how funny! What a knee-slapper! I was not bad looking, just not a beauty. Wonder if that meant if I could do that, then I was fairly prepared for most anything in the wide open world? Have you ever walked out on center stage, and it your name was the name the guys are calling out now? Mortification! Think that's when I was brought back to reality. Interestingly, years later I was called out to center stage for presentation of flowers as the organist in a concert. That was altogether different.

Untouchable. No, I am afraid not. Those youngsters at the top had no idea, of course, what all their future held then in 1962. Would I change anything? Only one, and that would be the death of our son Robert. However, that was probably the strongest component shaping who we are today. It is hard to not get off on a tangent here, but just as I learned at that time, life moves on, and so must I move on now.

So. What about this Love I talk about us having today? When I was younger, and felt the passion of Love, I could not fathom . . ahem . . older people really knowing, still feeling what Love is all about. Oh, ho! Did I ever have it backwards! Our lives strewn about with all the kids events for thirty some-odd years, we never had a chance for one another as we did in those first days of Romance. I have stated earlier that once we shook all the kid stuff out of our . . ahem . . hair, we started laughing, getting tickled, even just plain ole being silly sometimes, nothing superficial, but something from deep within. I wish I could describe it more clearly, but I guess maybe you just gotta live it before you can know it, and at 65 and 68, we have lived enough to know it now.

My children and grandchildren have been the joy of my life for the past 43 years, but I am enjoying watching them form their own lives now into what they want for themselves, while their dad and granddad pick up where we left off a long time ago. It is a shame I cannot transfer the expression on my heart as I write this, for you would then be able to see just what Love is all about.

Untouchable. No, the young couple at the top were touched, and it was by all the ways that life touched us that brought us to where we are today. And, in fact, life is still touching us, so we are still adding to the depth of experiences that changes the luminosity of our Love.