Growing up, growing together create a lifetime of memories

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

Thirty-four years ago my husband and I stood at the altar at St. Bernadette's Church in Randolph and before God and friends promised to love one another until death did us part.

Death was something straight out of the movies back then, drama relegated to the final scene. So were the words: "To have and to hold, from this day forth."

I was 20. The groom was 21. Our favorite song was the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice" ("if we were married").

"Why don't you wait?" our parents asked. We looked at them as if they were crazy. My mother was 42, my father 44. What did they know? Why would we wait? We were in love. Didn't they know that all we wanted was to be together?

"I'm going to marry a boy named Ronald Lee Lynn," my best friend Rosemary announced one day when we were children and playing bride.

"Then I'm going to marry a boy named Ronald Lee Lynn, too," I said. We used to play the wedding march on my 45 rpm record player and imagine walking down a long church aisle to these thunderous notes. I used to put a doily on my head, fold my hands, lower my eyes and steal glances in my bedroom mirror.

That's what little girls did.

On my real wedding day, I wore a white gown and walked down the aisle to music I don't remember. The wedding march was not allowed in the Catholic Church in 1968. On her wedding day, four months later, Rose wore a white mini-dress and walked down the aisle of the Yale chapel to "The House of the Rising Sun," the only song the organist knew.

Today, couples getting married must prepare for marriage, not just for a wedding. They go to meetings and listen to other couples who have been married a long time tell them about the different stages they'll go through in their relationship, about sharing and expectations and forgiveness and about being a couple, but remaining individuals, too. A wedding is a day, they learn. A marriage is a life.

As if any of this registers. As if someone who hasn't traveled through space can know what it's like to walk on the moon.

It was all sun and moon and starry, starry nights for us. There was no world except our world. He used to come home from work and watch "McHale's Navy" while I cooked dinner. And I never thought, why is he watching TV while I'm cooking? I loved cooking then, playing house, setting the table, saying, "Dinner's ready, dear." Really. I said this.

I cooked. I cleaned. I was still in school so I studied, too. But at night, every night, I sat on the straight-backed aqua-blue couch we should never have bought. It was hard as cinder blocks. I picked it out. My fault, but he never said. I sat next to him, watching TV shows I didn't like, the way he ate meals I made that he didn't like because we were new at this and each of us lived only to please the other.

It was the honeymoon stage, definitely. How long did it last? How long it last? How much fried bologna could he stand? ("What do you mean you don't like fried bologna?") And, how long could I pretend to like "F Troop"?

"Til death do us part." We said those words again on our 25th anniversary. We renewed our vows at St. Gerard's in Canton in front of our children and our friends, death real this time around, not Tony and Maria singing, "There's a place for us, somewhere a place for us." We had seen what could happen to other people. We could see the empty chair at a table, the empty place in a room.

Now it's our 34th anniversary, not one to celebrate in a big way, not a benchmark, more like a road sign. Only a sign marking how far we have come, not how far we have to go.

We've been lucky. We grew up together. We raised children together. We have had the time to laugh and dream and struggle and cry together. This is not a big anniversary. And yet it is, because every anniversary, every year together is little dearer than the one before.

The years are not a given. People lose people they love every day. They die slowly after a long illness. Or they die suddenly in their sleep, or in a car or on their jobs in the middle of a day. Sept. 11 taught us that. Sept. 11 taught us a lot of things.

Will we grow old together? That's the hope. That's the plan. But in the meantime, there is only this, our anniversary day.