June 30, 1968

Today is my parents' fortieth wedding anniversary. I sent my parents a card thanking them for "taking the plunge," or else I would not have come into existence (I will tackle that notion in a later blog :) But, in honor of their milestone, I am posting a couple of excerpts from a nonfiction story I wrote a couple of years ago:

They say a woman is born with all of her eggs in her ovaries unlike a man whose sperm lasts only 72 hours before a new batch is made. Does this mean that we are as old as our mothers? I wonder about genetic memories, memories in the very nuclei of cells and tissue. My mother was born with me already inside of her: can we trace a lineage of mothers leading back to the very fingertips of God? We shared a body until I was born when she was 27. Are memories only stored in the brain, or are they more transient, moving through the bloodstream, passing through the skin like osmosis—

What would have happened if my mother had not been set up on a blind date with my father for an A & P Christmas party? I've heard the story countless times. My father was a newly returned Vietnam veteran with thick black hair and thick black glasses and a smug Steve McQueen smile. He worked nights, stocking the shelves, spending the rest of his time smoking, drinking, and cruising. A "bad boy" with too much integrity, honesty, and self-discipline not to hold a steady job and earn his paycheck and make himself an invaluable employee. My mother was a checkout clerk and the bookkeeper. When she was young, her hair was a deep auburn. She wore it short, Julie Andrews-style, and her skin was the color of cream. The irony of the whole thing is that my father loves women with long hair, who like motorcycles rides, who have that element of "danger" to them. My mother, meanwhile, did not want someone who smoked or drank. She wanted a God-fearing, chorale-singing man, who knew how to work hard but also enjoy fine things. And, yet, at that Christmas party, things sparked.

"I knew I was going to marry her that first night," my father says.

"I knew, too," my mother says shyly. She often feigns a blushy-faced modesty when discussing things like the two of them dating.

I guess it's what people call "chemistry." Maybe it was my father's hands. They are pale, slight at the wrist, marked by scars from slipped hammers and metal splinters. His hands were one of the things that attracted my mother to him. She wanted to feel each of his calluses brushing against her skin; she said she didn’t want a man with smooth hands. Her father’s hands were rough from years of farming, and in an Oedipal way, she loved the thought of a “man’s” hands being rugged, dirt lined, scratchy. Perhaps my mother knew this man with hands like these would work hard for her, for a family.

My father didn't call her after the party, and my mother feared the worst. She talked to her mother, to her friends. It was my grandmother who told her that if she wanted him, she had to do something about it.

"Write him a note, talk to him."

The story goes: my mother wore her evergreen-colored leather jacket with the wind sweeping through her red hair, her black cat-eye glasses framing those deep-set hazel eyes, slipped her hands in her pockets and leaned against the side of my father's car.

"When you gonna come out and see me some time?" she supposedly asked.

My father recites this with a little Lauren Bacall staccato. He says it was sexy. My mother says she was merely asking—"he heard it the way he wanted to." She blushes.

By mid-January, they were engaged and a June wedding date was set. They said from the minute they met they started talking and didn't stop. Forty years later, they will still sit in the kitchen after supper, sipping tea, talking about a variety of things. They are a model-marriage, looking from both the inside and outside. They are still physically wild about each other, and my father leaves her little presents to commemorate the anniversaries of small milestones only they know about—they are probably the only couple in America that "celebrate" the day they do taxes. Most couples bicker about money, but my parents bake a cherry pie, order in food, mark the day on the calendar like a holiday, and laugh as the adding machine whirls and thumps how little they'll get back.

Maybe if my mother had gone to college things would've been different. Maybe they can be so close to each other because of the trials they've endured as parents: a suicidal son and an abominable daughter.


On my parents' wedding day, June 30, 1968, the temperatures were sweltering. They both talk about how their glasses kept slipping off their noses. The little white church in Hoytville, Ohio was full, stuffy, congested with proud family members, the occasional crying newborn—one of my older cousins, I'm sure. My mother sewed her own wedding dress from a picture she'd seen in some magazine. My father wore a white suit jacket and black tuxedo pants. Their wedding colors were aqua blue and red.

I can picture my mother walking down the isle beside her father, overly warm from his body heat. Everyone smiling in their pews. When it comes time to speak the vows, my father's voice cracks, and he begins to cry, tears mingling with the sweat sliding down his cheeks. My mother cries, too. They are both so young: 21 and 23. The minister is a pudgy bald man with thick glasses and a raspy voice. This is what is expected; they are fulfilling the promise of their parents and their parents before them.

"I now pronounce you, man and wife," the minister speaks, oblivious to how ludicrous it is that a wedding has made my father a "man" and my mother only a "wife."

When my father, with tears in his grey-blue eyes, carefully lifts her veil and leans down to kiss her, their lips nearly slip off each other. Everyone stands up in a scramble of feet and applauds; my parents' exciting new life as a couple has begun.

And, I'm there, in that moment, already inside of my mother, at least part of who I will become, and so is my brother, both of us waiting to be breathed into existence.

Years later, I will try on my mother's wedding dress, my mother and I sorting through the attic, but it is too small for me, my shoulders much too wide—it would never be the right fit. It simply wasn't made for my body.