MARRIAGE

/ janpriddyoregon

When we’d been together a few years, people frequently asked us how we’d managed to stick together. It seemed odd at the time. Three or four years is not long enough to prove permanence, it seemed to me. It feels odder now that no one asks us how we managed to stay together—we were only asked that back in the early 1970s.

Here we are at our wedding fifty years ago today. Gary is feeding me cake I baked from the Fanny Farmer Cook Book. I am wearing a Bedouin wedding dress I bought while I worked at La Tienda on the Ave. It was not new even then, and the embroidery included birds. Gary is wearing a Guatemalan shirt from the same shop and a vest I made for him.

I will tell you why it’s been easy for me, even in the years I stayed home with our sons, even after a friend assumed I’d abandoned all hope of creative work, even when I was working insane hours as a high school yearbook advisor and English teacher.

Gary.

Gary and I met in 1969. It is a romantic story and I like to tell it, but this is our fiftieth wedding anniversary and we are at the beach but meant to be staying at our favorite hotel just a hundred miles south. That didn’t work out, which is not a romantic story but a funny one I might tell later.

Jan in the Beduioin dress and dried flowers she wore fifty years ago.
Gary is wearing his Irish shirt & vest I bought for him more recently.

.

Instead, I will say that my husband brings me coffee in bed every morning, which makes him a saint. He also brought coffee to my dad and later almost every day for months to my widowed mother. He would stop by her house on his way to work and call out to her, “Do you want coffee?” Her voice came back whispery, “Oh, yes,” and he would get the coffee going and then bring her a cup in bed.

How could I not adore a man who did that?

Years before, when he managed Mohler, he’d get home after working ten or twelve hours and go into the boys’ room to play with them while I put together a plate of food for him. I’d find him sound asleep on the floor, the boys busy playing nearby, and Lego walls built across his body.

That man is the one I’ve been married to for fifty years today.

We never had a honeymoon, and we’ve spent most anniversaries at home, several anniversaries in a row at the ER with my mom, and most day in the past few years going for walks early in the morning. We worked hard, raised our children, tried to bring beauty into the world, and whenever we could we were kind to others and to one another. That is a good life; that might be the best life we could live together.

We went out to breakfast at The Lazy Susan in Cannon Beach, the first place we bought a meal after moving to the Arch Cape house forty-five years ago. It still serves terrific food. The Coaster Theatre in the background is where Ian and Kerris were married. In a previous life that building was a skating rink where my mother and her sister roller-skated.

The panel on the chest had been moved from another dress, but there is cross-stitch in bands down the front and around all the openings, red and multi-colored stitching over seams, and blue silk velvet on the shoulders. I was in the shop when the boxes of dresses was opened. La Tienda’s owner liked this one best too, but she was tall. I was lucky the dress was made for someone like me.

16 thoughts on “MARRIAGE”

  4. the last 50 years plus the 4 or 5 before have been our honeymoon—it’s like going on vacation and taking all your furniture with you—good times, thrill seekers—the story jan will tell later about our August 23 adventure–when she tells it, it will make your nesbits squeal like a new borne jellyfish. and I’m not kidding–I was told I was there and probably had a good time which with wit and a keen stench of humus allows me to get by—of course having her as a totally evermore and forever friend lover and doesn’t hurt either—kiitos, Jan—love, Gary

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

      • well I am sorry to say I can’t remember that. Oh well. You look lovely in your wedding dress and I love that you wore to breakfast! I am glad you had a happy humorous anniversary!

        Liked by 1 person

      • Mom flushed them by mistake—something she always denied, but I saw her do flush tissue and that’s what they we re in. I’d put a red rouge polish on them after I finished them and I never did that because that polish is so fragile, so I’d wrapped them in a tissue. I remade them later, and then last year I remade the sterling ring I’d made for Gary while I was still in high school, adding gold beads.

        Liked by 1 person

Leave a comment