solid gold

At the beach in LA, in the late 1930’s, my mom’s best friend, my Aunt Irma, saw a boy at a French community picnic and said, "There’s the man I’m going to marry." Aunt Irma introduced my mom to one of her boyfriend’s five brothers. My parents dated in high school and talked about getting married. My grandfather didn’t want my mom to marry a future accountant who was Catholic. He wanted her to marry someone reasonable, someone he had picked out for her: someone in the circus.

My mom dutifully broke up with my dad and married the trapeze flyer and traveled circus to circus–with a train load of animals and the Flying Wallendas–but ended up moving back home with her parents in LA after a couple of years. If you ask my mom what she did while with the circus, she will tell you: "Washed tights." My dad married the mother of my sisters Janet, Jill and Carol, and joined the Air Force during WWII. He was wounded by "friendly fire" in India–he was shot in the hip, arm and hand by a machine gun at short distance–and spent two years hospitalized. He will happily point out that he later passed a typing test with a finger that had been shot. (And in spite of not really having a hip, he later taught me to swing dance.) My mom married a man with the LA police force and had my sister Valerie.

A few years later, with three troubled marriages and four kids between them, my parents ran into each other in line at the bank. My dad asked my mom out for coffee, and over coffee proposed. Almost twenty years after initially dating, at the Chapel of the Pines in Las Vegas, they got married. That was fifty years ago today. Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad!