Today Would Have Been My Parents’ 50th Wedding Anniversary

On an early May morning in 1974 in Queens, New York, a young girl in a satin white dress and lace veil married her high-school sweetheart, ten days shy of her twentieth birthday. Her eyes were large and blue, and they saw a future as beautiful as her long blonde hair, which, in those days, reached from crown to calf. His bushy curls were jet black. His 22-year-old face was shaved bare, except for the thick tough-guy mustache that defined the era. He wore a velvet tuxedo, a large plush bowtie, a decadently ruffled dress shirt. To the modern eye, it was all the fashion of a bygone era. Because today that was 50 years ago.

I am the son of the blonde beauty and the tough guy.

Growing up, the story of their wedding day was never the primary family narrative. In marriages that last, the story of that day is an anchor, a point of origin for all other family stories. In marriages that end in divorce, the wedding day is just one more story that gets buried. It disappears. It evaporates. Just like the story of how they met, the story of how and why they fell in love, any story that celebrates, honors, commemorates. These stories get re-cast, swapped and replaced with the story of their separation, why they fell out of love, who hurt whom, how they loathe each other’s presence.