Love and Memories: A Wedding Story from 1973

Funny how a Kentucky morning can set your mind wandering. The light came in low and gold across the back pasture today, and somewhere between the first cup of coffee and the second, I found myself thinking about our girls’ weddings—all four of them, those daughters of ours who now have little ones (including our great grandchildren) climbing on their own furniture. We’d just gotten back from Wisconsin, and driving by Madison had done it, thinking about the downtown hotel where we threw Dina’s wedding. The brick facade is unchanged, though the awning is a different color.

We got to talking about our own wedding not long after that—Madison has a way of doing that to us, pulling the thread until the whole sweater comes loose. Fifty-three years is a long time to carry a story around without telling it, and somewhere between the highway and home, I decided some of you might enjoy hearing how it all looked at the very beginning, and just maybe why old people like us think about things in a way others will never understand.

We were married in 1973, fifty-three years ago now, when the inflation rate was 6.3% and nobody thought much of it—a fact worth sitting with the next time you hear someone howling about 3.5%. I was pulling in $300 a week as an underwriter trainee, enough to cover a one-bedroom apartment and fill the tank at 39 cents a gallon, with a little left over for a dozen eggs at 70 cents. We didn’t know what we didn’t have. That particular kind of ignorance is its own happiness.

Our wedding took place in New England, North Dakota, in the dead of winter, which in that part of the world means a cold that gets into the car doors and the hinges of your jaw. We had no money—living paycheck to paycheck—and frankly our parents didn’t have any either. Deb looked beautiful in a wedding dress she borrowed from a co-worker, ivory with long sleeves, practical for the season.

My parents couldn’t afford a rehearsal dinner and on my side there was only my Mom, Dad, and my sister, the three of them in a row like a short sentence. I told myself it was the weather, the distance, the time of year—and I almost believed it—but the truth was that my family had about the same emotional attachment to each other that a minnow has for a seagull. No cousins, no aunts, no uncles. Debbie’s family was there in full force, coats piled high in the corner, filling the room with noise and perfume.

Our band was three people—Debbie’s aunt and uncle, plus another—and they played polka music from the first song to the last, because that was the only music they knew, and nobody had thought to ask us beforehand since it was the only band anyone could afford. The venue was Memorial Hall, which wasn’t a hall at all but an old town community gym, folding tables draped in white paper, the ladies of New England having each brought something in covered dishes that steamed when you lifted the lids. Our wedding night was spent in a one-bedroom Motel Six kind of room in Dickinson that smelled of industrial carpet cleaner. The honeymoon was the long drive back to Chicago, with one night in Anoka, Minnesota, where I ordered ribs and spent most of the night on the bathroom floor paying for it.

When we finally got home we opened our wedding presents. Dish towels, a casserole dish, a set of steak knives in a velvet-lined box. Then my parents’ gift: four snow tires for the Toyota Corona, wrapped in nothing. Practical as a handshake but possibly the best thing we got.

So that was our wedding experience. A 3,000-mile round trip drive, and we loved it. A year later Dina was born—seven pounds, 15 ounces, arriving in the middle of October—and the flat $300 maternity benefit covered the hospital bill the way a paper napkin covers a dinner plate. We brought her home to the one-bedroom apartment and set up the crib where the armchair used to be.

Life could not have been better. We didn’t know enough to want more than we had, and that is a kind of wealth I’ve spent fifty years trying to explain to people who grew up with more of everything except that.

Such is life.