Wedding Day, 7 August 1982
Is there a name for an anniversary that is no longer celebrated?
Today, while tending to my routine of posting deck logs to a Facebook group dedicated to the history of the USS Zircon (PY-16), one of the two ships my dad served on during World War II, I naturally had to look at the date on the log sheet. While the year was 1942, the day was the 7th of August, the date on which I would get married forty years later.
When I recall that day, my mind often refers back to the photographs that my then-bride Penny's sister Paula took using my Nikkormat FTN 35mm camera. The above photo is one that often sticks in my memory as it's one that years later—at the time we were going through our split up—Penny would point to (literally or figuratively, I can't recall) as proof that I didn't want to be married, or words to that effect. And because I am nothing if not a rehasher of the past, I've often thought about those remarks, picture or no picture.
Of course, those words, on their face, are not true. I did want to be married to her. But I just didn't know what that meant. At just over three years, our relationship had been my longest to date, and for most of that time we lived a little over two hours apart—I in Bowling Green, Ohio, and she in Lansing, Michigan. I lived with her for about three weeks while I commuted back and forth to Jackson, Michigan for a job I had as part of an internship, but by and large, we didn't spend a whole lot of time together until after I'd graduated. I recall living with her for a spell in which I took a piddly job with some kind of mail-order operation that didn't last long, but I eventually went back to Toledo to work with Lane Drug, a pharmacy-convenience store which had stores throughout northwestern Ohio, and owned an East Coast company, Peoples Drug, which was fairly massive.
While the relationship seemed to be heading toward marriage, we didn't talk about it much. As best as I can recall, we didn't talk about our aspirations as regards children or career goals, but we seemed compatible in so many ways. Penny's folks approved of me, and I got along well with her siblings. Her mom had been adopted as a young girl, and Penny had a pretty close relationship with her mom's adoptive parents, especially her grandmother, Laverne. If memory serves, sometime in 1981 Laverne took a fall or two and—as seems to be typical in such cases—developed pneumonia and/or other complications. During this time, Penny brought up marriage; she wanted to tell Laverne that we were getting married. It wasn't a proposal per se, it was more like a strong suggestion, but of course, I agreed. Laverne would die in September of that year.
We agreed that the wedding would be a simple one, and the plan was to hold it on the front lawn at her parents house just outside Laingsburg, Michigan proper. Penny had great affection for the large tree just outside the front door of the house, and that's where she wanted the ceremony to take place. We agreed to invite a very limited number of guests, which would bend the noses of a few of her life-long friends, but neither of us were big-time partiers, so something low-key was best served by inviting fewer than seventy people.
As I was in Ohio for most of the year leading up to the event, Penny took care of most of the details. She designed the invitations and had them printed, she made her own dress, she had the rings of silver made by a local artist. I think her dad took care of procuring a canopy or two to cover the food. My biggest contribution besides saying "OK" a lot was probably putting together the mix tape (which kicked off with this), and—on the day of the wedding—running speaker wire from her parents' living room to the outdoors and mounting speakers on the house's exterior. I also brought the camera and film for the pictures.
The pictures.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most marriages are a first time occasion for the couples involved. Getting married was absolutely new to me, but also, I have to admit, was making public displays of affection. On this particular day, I had no clue about what to do with my hands or my body. Why didn't I take Penny's hand? you might ask. Yeah, I wonder about that, too. Why didn't I stand closer to her? I have no answer, really, other than that maybe... MAYbe it had something to do with the fact that in all the weddings I'd ever seen, the couples actually only unite once the vows are spoken. I'm kind of grasping at straws, because I was totally enamoured with Penny and thrilled that I was the lucky one to be standing so awkwardly to her right.
Ultimately, though, the marriage didn't work out. I honestly feel as though Penny was ready to call it quits not long after our son Zachary was born in February of 1985. I was so ill-prepared to be a good husband or partner. For one, I spent more time at work than I did at home. Not because the job meant more to me than she did—far from it—I was just not good at what I was supposed to be doing, and I lived in constant fear of losing the job and the relatively good income that supported us. It was something that I kept to myself when I came home, as I wanted neither to burden her with my crap nor to admit to my weakness. A guy thing, I guess. This went on year after year after year until it came to a head ten years later and I felt compelled to resign. Whatever fine, scintilla of a thread that might have been holding the marriage together snapped that day. Yes, there was so much more to it than that, but that was a huge factor, and one which I think led to everything else.
We've now been divorced for over twice as long as we were married. It took a while but for several years now, the 7th of August has passed without notice (as has 22 June, the date we met), but as I still have four years worth of deck logs to post at Facebook, it'll probably be at least that long before the date doesn't bring back the best of the memories from that day and those times.
Penny and Me
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