Golden!

It's pretty easy to remember what I was doing on this day exactly 50 years ago. Hanging out poolside at the Viking Inn in Port Lavaca, Texas, waiting for the hour when I would put on my sharp new white jacket, gather up my groomsmen and get to the church on time to marry the love of my life.

We had been through the rehearsal the previous inning, scurrying afterwards to the restaurant to swap place cards at the dinner, because Barb's sister and my roommate were suddenly speaking to each other again, after being  decidedly on the outs for the previous couple of months. We went our separate ways after the rehearsal dinner, and now all I had to do was stay out of the way until time for the wedding.

In retrospect, hanging out at the pool on your wedding day might not be the best choice; a raging sunburn is not something you want to take with you on your honeymoon. But the sunburn did not last; the marriage did.

Fifty years. In some ways that's a lot harder to get my head around than reaching 70 years of age. The first time I ever saw Barb was during rehearsals for the homecoming musical at ACU. The show was Brigadoon, and I had a small, but oh-so-vital role as Andrew McLaren, village elder: "Aye, laddie, yer in Brigadoon!" Be sure to roll the r's. Barb had followed a friend from her dorm over to rehearsals and soon was active in all things theater. Well, as much as an Elementary Ed major could be. More about that in a minute.

For years, whenever Barb and I would go to some gathering or party, and they did the old ice-breaker, "Tell us something about yourselves that nobody knows," I would say, "When I met my wife, she was a call girl." Depending on the group, that was sometimes a show stopper. In fact, a call girl - in theatrical terms - is the director's Girl Friday, responsible for many duties, the most important of which was making sure the members of the very large cast were "called" from the green room, or wherever they were offstage, prior to their entrance onstage. I was usually somewhere behind the scenery, hitting on Judy Boone, Pat's little sister. Needless to say, Barb's first impression of me was NOT, "Now there's a young man I would really be interested in marrying."

I continued to endear myself to her in many other ways. I was very proud of the fact that I was a disk-jockey of some renown in our small town; she thought I was a Dork. When she thought about me at all. When we did begin to date, it irritated her that I was always wanting her to hang out or go get a coke or something; her (correct) impression was I never studied, while she was carrying a 4.0 average, and had to do the work that regimen required.

But somehow she overlooked all that and one June day in 1961 we went by Sewell Auditorium - the place where we met - and I got down on my knee and recited the best line I ever said on that stage. To my everlasting good fortune she said yes.

There might have been little glitches over the years; Barb has always felt that it would have been to my benefit if my mother had stressed the need for me to pick after myself just a wee bit more than she did. And did you know that the dryer makes a little sound that means it's time to take the laundry out and hang them up? Me neither. It's possible that there have been other things, but they are so minor I can't recall any of them now. You know, this might be a good time to turn off comments on this blog. Just saying.

I told my son at his rehearsal dinner that none of us deserve the women we wed; we all marry up. I cannot tell you how true that has been for me. My parents were married for 72 years. Neither of us have those genes, but at 50, I somehow think the best is yet to come.

I'm looking forward to that, my love.