Saturday, December 28, 2013

FORTY YEARS

December 29, 1973

It doesn't seem like it was yesterday

 
Here are some things I have remembered for four decades:
  • I forgot the wedding ring. 
  • My high school and college friends played poker in my hotel room the night before and kept me up. High school beat college. Badly. 
  • Suzanne’s Uncle Hank gave us 5 hundred dollar bills. That would be about a jillion dollars today.
  •  I can’t recall any of the other wedding gifts, but I do remember that Tim McGinnis, a fellow DEKE, bought us a popcorn popper but then he couldn’t make it to the wedding so he kept the popper. Some things you never forget.
  • They weren’t selling gas on weekends due to the Arab oil embargo so we had to take a Greyhound bus for our honeymoon to Montreal. The bus was packed and we couldn’t sit together. I sat in the back with convicts who were returning from prison furlough. Years later I used that incident as the inspiration for my short story, Riding a Greyhound Bus into the New World, which took 3rd place in the Canadian Writers Collective Short Story Contest (you didn’t have to be Canadian to enter).
  • Suzanne was a beautiful bride.
  • She still is.