Updated: See below

My parents were married 70 years ago today on November 23*, 1943, right in the middle of the United State’s participation in WW II.

I don’t have many pictures of them together during the years before and after they got married. I have posted a couple, but this is my favorite. I’m not sure when or where it was taken, but I think it was after they were married because I think I can see a ring on my mother’s ring finger. I guess it was after the war, possibly when they lived in Akron, Ohio.

Bo and Doris sitting on a tree

They were young when they got married. My father had turned 26 in August, and my mother wouldn’t be 21 until January. Today I think of people that age as kids.

Here is a really blurry picture of my mother lying on a bed. It’s possible this was taken in one of the disreputable apartments they had to live in while my father continued his military training.

Lounging around

She’s just a kid.

The only time I ever did anything for them on their anniversary was for their 50^th. I was living in Huntsille, Al. On that day at work I called a florist in Rome and ordered 50 roses for them. My mother said they thought the delivery guy would never stop bringing in roses.

They had been married 56 years when my father died.

It’s hard for me to internalize the fact that they got married that long ago. Of course I showed up only about six and a half years later in 1950, so I have memories that go back almost that far, uncertain though they may be. But since my mother died earlier this year, they both seem to be fluttering away like a yellowed newspaper clipping that slips out a car window. They are disappearing into a faded and dim history, and they are going fast. I can remember them but I can’t hold on to them.

At the same time, distance and my own age let me think of them not as Mother and Daddy, but as individuals who had a life independent of me. (Despite the fact that I am the center of the universe, they were around and doing things before I even existed.) That’s one reason I like to look at old photographs of them, long before they got old and sick and weary.

Maybe what Joni Mitchell sang is true: You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

* My parents had a good-natured, running disagreement about the date of their wedding anniversary. My mother always thought it was on November 22 or 24, but my father said it was on November 23. Or maybe she thought it was November 23. I can’t remember.

UPDATE

I had intended to call or email my brother before I wrote this post to ask whether he remembered the true date of our parent’ anniversary, but I waited around until it was too late. I spoke to him today (Nov 23) and it he said he would check to see whether he could find their marriage certificate. He did.

The evidence

It turns out that I got sucked into the running disagreement. Their marriage license shows that they were married on November 24, 1943. So, please reread this post on Sunday, November 24.

It is a little strange that the license says “as appears on record in my office in Marriage Record book … April 1946.” That’s three and a half years after they were married. Did they lose the original license? Did they not get it when they were married? Did the marriage record book have a mistake, and the true date was, say, November 23? Was there some delay in getting the information to the county ordinary’s office? Did my mother mistakenly fix November 23 in her mind during the three years they apparently didn’t have a license? I guess we’ll never know.

By the way, the name of the county ordinary at the bottom of the license is Harry Johnson. I went to school with his son, Harry Johnson Jr.