June 9th

At the stroke of midnight, as it were (there being no strokes, just a digital flash that says 12:00), I can't help thinking that June 9th would be my fiftieth wedding anniversary if I were still married.

That leads me to think about the person who walked down that aisle, clueless really, about anything beyond the wedding.

It was the way of the world back then and many of us bought it--giving away our names before we knew who we were, the carriers of our own names.  So many of us 18-year-old girls glowed our hearts out at the prospect of being married, the sooner the better!

Eighteen year olds (I now know, having taught so many of them in college) do not have strong chooser muscles. They are just beginning to imagine themselves as separate people with their own dreams and desires. Yet the girls in all the wedding pictures of the late Sixties were willing to "obey" some guy one or two or seven years older than they were?  "To love, honor and obey...." I thought those were the words that made the marriage legal!

We believed that a man would complete us.  The music of the Sixties told us so.  We may have sung "Climb Every Mountain..." at our graduations, but the songs that had us flipping through Brides Magazine were songs like "Cherish" and "Unchained Melody."  Really, there was only one mountain, the big rock candy mountain of Marriage.

The girl in this picture doesn't look like a glowing bride.  She looks pensive and dazed, like an actor who only knows a few lines and isn't sure how she wound up in this play.