loracs | Aug. 18, 1956 (Reply)

Fifty years ago today my parents were married. I was there, sort of. I was a clump of cells, approx. 3 months old. I do not believe my parents were a match made in heaven, in fact, I’m pretty sure they never would have married if it wasn’t for me. By simply existing, I changed the course of several people’s lives. My sister, N wouldn’t have had a stepfather that sexually abused her. My sister, J never would have graduated high school without her stepmother’s help. Neither of them would have had a baby sister, who they loved, fought with, forgave, and vexed them whenever possible.

My father got a wife who kept house, raised me and my half sisters, supported him when he wanted to buy a gas station and work it 6 am to 10 pm 7 days a week, kept the books for it, kept her tongue 90% of the time, stopped working when he said so and went into major debt in her early 50’s so he could buy 20 acres and fulfill his live long dream of owing a farm. What my mother did do was put her foot down when it came to moving out to the farm. It was only 20 minutes away by car, but she didn’t drive and there was no mass transit system at all serving the area. The only neighbor was a family with a son my age. The wife left her husband and son about a year after we bought the property. Years later the son shot his girlfriend, put the gun in his trunk and tried to plead innocent. After the forensic tests proved his gun killed her and only his fingerprints were on it, he confessed. When asked why he didn’t get rid of the gun, he said “It was my favorite gun; you don’t just throw something like that away.”

But I digress.

My parents met at work. It was an ammunition plant, my mother worked in the office and my dad worked for a construction company. This was in the mid-fifties and thanks to the cold war, the government was in the big business of ammunition production and the plant was constantly in a state of expansion. On paydays my mom disbursed the checks. She once told me what attracted her to dad was how clean he was. Most of the “boys” were covered with yellow dust from working in the plant, but my dad worked outside as a foreman making yet another building where future boys would file out, covered in yellow dust, to pick up their pay. I never heard what attracted my dad to mom.

There were very few dating stories. I suspect they mostly went to bars; even then my father had a very limited social circle. My mom, on the other hand, loved to socialize and dragged him to several picnics and other gatherings. Once, he decided to take her to a movie in Chicago – the BIG city. Mom said he “sweated bullets”, soaking several handkerchiefs before they made it back to his comfort zone, i.e. within a few miles from home. I don’t have exact dates, but I don’t believe they dated all that long before mom got pregnant.

Mom was Catholic and dad was not. He was sort of Baptist, but only remembers going to church maybe a dozen times in his life. He agreed I would be raised as a Catholic and this allowed them to be married, not in the Church proper, but by a priest in the rectory. He was a widow and my mom already had a daughter “out of wedlock”, so even if the priest didn’t know mom was pregnant with me, he couldn’t marry them in the actual church. That would just desecrate the space and they’d probably have to do lots of praying and incenses burning to get the stench of sin out of it.

In their wedding picture, mom was in a pale blue dress with a pink corsage, pearl necklace, black gloves and a hat. The hat looked a bit like an upside down pie tin covered with pleated pink satin. Dad had on a dark suit, white shirt, a tie and a pink carnation in his lapel. And in his right hand, almost out of the camera’s eye, was the obligatory cigarette. They were posed in front of a large wooden piece of furniture with a mirror. There’s a slight flare from the flash behind mom’s head. And there’s a mantel above their heads with a statue of, what appears to be, a black panther in a stalking stance. What this was doing in a church rectory is anyone’s guess.

I’m pretty sure I know what my dad was thinking on his wedding day. “Let’s get this over with so I can go home.” I have no idea what mom was thinking. Did she wonder if she was making a mistake? Was she really happy to be getting married? Was she just glad that she wouldn’t have to raise a second child alone? Did they love each other then? Did they love each other at any time during their marriage? I know if you’d asked, they both would have said “yes”, but I’m not so sure. The only thing I really, truly know is that they loved me.

Look how powerful that little bundle of cells were; they changed the course of history for at least 4 people; 5 if you count the big bundle of cells telling this tale.