“Well, that was your mother and that was your father,
Before you was born dude,...”
Paul Simon
Before the dudes and dudettes were born? Whoa, that was a LONG time ago!
The one advantage of all that time is it gives us a chance to tell the stories as WE remember them, with paltry few to gainsay us in matters of truth or tale…
He says he saw this girl wearing a big hat sitting at the desk of the dormitory where incoming MU freshmen checked in for Summer Welcome. And...then they wed, implying he married the first girl he met at college. My husband makes it sound like a scene from a chick flick...but I’m fairly certain he has never seen a chick flick, so it must be the truth, right?
I remember that day too. We had a discussion about Allen Drury...Blake was carrying around a copy of Advise and Consent, a scenario which should surprise absolutely no one….
Well, it can’t be a chick flick without some plot twists.
A few months and a couple of dates later, we were both part of an ag students’ group traveling way up north into Manitoba over the Christmas break. When we stopped in Tarkio on the way south, it seemed like a perfectly logical place to spend New Year’s Eve with friends. Only later did my mother-in-law tell me she was delegated to tell Blake’s other New Year’s Eve “date” that he was already busy.
Blake drove a 1974 baby blue Torino. It wasn’t “Gran” by any description: the trunk smelled of sale barn, but that was masked by the blue pall of burning oil. It took a gallon of oil to drive from Tarkio to Columbia. Blake had a case of 8 track tapes by Charlie Rich, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings punctuated by Tompall & the Glaser Brothers (Put Another Log on the Fire) and David Allan Coe (You Never Even Call Me by My Name). The tires were constantly going flat. When the right side was caved in by another car’s slow motion slide down the icy hill where we waited at a stop sign, it was a mercy killing.
The next car was a stripped down sedate red sedan…
...which in due course we turned into a family car. No more oil spills, no more spinning out around the curves.
We married the year Elvis died. For two days I listened to Elvis tunes while I sat on the floor of our duplex south of Columbia staining the unfinished furniture that, along with a carload of houseplants, was my contribution to our new household.
Our ‘70s wedding was not a fairy tale concoction. Neither the bride nor the groom thought it essential to get a decent haircut. The tuxes were an obnoxious beige, and the groom’s new shoes were not brown nor black but rather on the orange-ish side of rust. They didn’t match then and look even worse in the fading pinkish tint of our wedding photos. The bride wore heels down the aisle, but went barefoot in the pictures for fear of appearing taller than the groom.
We drove off in our soaped and creamed chariot for our honeymoon...in Union, Missouri. But our plans for a romantic toast at the Italian restaurant went awry when the waitress carded us. Newlywed or no, she wasn’t going to serve us alcohol for our wedding night. So much for being grownups…if I remember correctly, we even thought it was funny back then.
The next day, we stopped by Daniel Boone’s home in Defiance, then drove back to Columbia to study before class that Monday.
Yep. That’s what we did
“That was your mother...and that was your father...
Before you was born, dude,
When life was great!”....
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