My baby will be getting married in just a bit over 10 months from now. We've known since last year but now, now the months and days are upon them and I am filled with bliss. My Love and I wonder of what plans they will make for their special day and how different it will be from ours.
This is our year that we will have been married 35 years and though it sounds a long time ago, it feels on some days like a lifetime and on other days a blink of the eye. Those 35 years ago our parents were healthy, happy, and active. Now Papa is gone, my mom is merely a shadow of the woman she was, my Love's parents have approached the stage of memory tricks and failing bodies.
My Love and I so young, I just 19 and he 24. So much ahead that we could never imagine our future beyond that day. That we would have four children that would add so much to our lives, test our patience, amaze us with their theatrics and humor, pull us to our knees with concern through illness and teen years. Now our first born will be married.
When my Love and I got engaged I was 18 and a freshman in college. We came from the generation that shook our parents up with freedom of choices with our bodies and our minds. My Love and I had been living together off and on since I had moved out into my own place. We still had separate abodes, mine an apartment my parents got for me and my Love lived in a converted garage (not very charming mind you). I had been dating him since I was 16 and though we didn't rush into a physical relationship, eventually we did. It was only natural for us to stay together but we also new that it was frowned upon by our parents and their generation.
Given that my mom had a huge hissy fit when she discovered that we really were planning on just moving in together, that the previous years of her knowing we were having sex (she did get me on the pill), let us go off for "honeymoon weekends" as well as a very long extended trip to Canada between my junior and senior year in high school, was as far as she could rationally deal with socially. Her friends might find out. I wouldn't say we choose to marry because she didn't want us to live together, only that we were quite in love and it felt as natural as could be to become married. No one twisted my Love's arm or held a shotgun to his head. My only frustration is that I can't remember how he proposed to me. It wasn't some exotic location or over the top planned event. It was his honest heart that spoke to me.
When my mom learned that he had proposed she was a crazed woman of planning. Those that know my mom can only imagine the possible hyper state she must have been in. Tim hadn't gotten me an engagement ring thus she popped out several old diamonds from family heirlooms that we could choose from. Off to Shreves in San Francisco to have a setting made for it. My Love and I, the dog and pony act, went and nodded heads for the simplest gold setting we could find. My diamond is from her father's tie stick pin. A couple of chips that flaw it's value but the sentimental girl I am loved it. I have no idea if we would have otherwise decided on a diamond engagement ring had she not offered one. I was no help to her potential wedding plans. I had my ideas and she had hers. What happened was a merger, though not always agreed.
My idea was simple. My Love and I, in a meadow, with old oak trees surrounding it. I would be in an off the shoulder peasant top with a gypsy full skirt that fell to the ground. Barefoot. He would be in an off white, button down (but chest exposed by 4 buttons) shirt with his coolest pants he wanted to wear. His blond, curly locks long and I with my late 70's hairdo. It would be just us and nature. We would say our own vows or just fall into each others arms. The dream wedding for me. My hippy heart longing to express itself.
*** This video...this was my song for my Love. He never knew this as I was shy to share this with him. Fits exactly how I felt about him all those years of dating.....
