Happy 40th Anniversary to Us

On April 9th I will be officially married for 40 years. I was blackmailed into marriage by my loving mother. The reason: She found out I was living with Drake without the benefit of matrimony. She disowned me and drummed me out of the family writing me a series of horrible letters designed to push every button she could think of to make me feel guilty and ashamed. She was actually a bit slow on the uptake. I had been living with him for more than a year when she went out of her way to discover the awful truth. By contrast, my loving mother-in-law decided that turning a blind eye was a much better way to handle the situation. What she chose not to know, we didn't have to deal with.

In 1969, when I was 19 and madly in love, nice girls did "IT", but furtively in the back seats of cars and in cheap motels where the management wasn't too picky about who they rented their rooms to. Most of them had engagement rings on their fingers before they 'surrendered'. I actually started living with Drake in my dorm room that autumn. It was clean. It was quiet. It had a bed. How did we manage this, you ask? I had a unique situation. A single room (after my sophomore roommate moved out), and a floor that was one-half women's honor's housing and one-half the Sigma Epsilon FRATERNITY.

There was someone who really didn't think ahead when the university housing was planned for that year. The dormitory was 12 stories and laid out in the shape of an X. The center of the X on each floor was the elevator lobby. Floors 2 and 3 were campus housing for adults who were coming back to school and for some unknown reason decided to enjoy hard dorm beds, built in desks, minuscule closets, and bad cafeteria food. Floors 5 - 12 were leased to the United States Post Office. Yes, every two weeks a new batch of postal workers arrived for zip code school or something. I never did figure out what they came for, but they stayed for about two weeks, and then like clockwork, a new batch would arrive. They were all men, and they were all housed in my dormitory.

They fell into two groups: Group One: Nice older guys who paced around the lobby and jingled the change in their pockets, counting the days until they could go home to their wives and kids who they fiercely missed. Group Two was not nearly so benign. An odor of liquor hung about them - a feat considering Oklahoma was an almost 'dry' state. They talked a little too loud, and stood a little too close to you if you were unlucky enough to get trapped by a Group Two guy. I was actually in the best cardio shape of my life because I routinely walked up four flights of stairs to get to my room. That year there were some elevators that no sane woman would get into.

So, here we were: Women's Honors Housing - on the fourth floor of a Post Office Hotel - that is actually a dormitory on a college campus. Are you surprised that some of the men who came in for zip code school thought we were a service provided by the United States government to make their stay a little more pleasurable? If this isn't bizarre enough, in come the Sig Eps. It wasn't long before we ladies of the fourth floor were so very glad they were there. I never did find out the real facts, but the rumor was the Sigma Epsilon Fraternity lost their house a week or so before school started, and the University leased one-half of the fourth floor of the Walker Towers to them for a fraternity house. All I know is there was a fraternity living on the same floor as I was in 1969.

Now, you would think the frat boys would hassle the women living within spitting distance of them incessantly. Not so. That was handled by the postal workers. It was all too common for a drunken post office guy (from the infamous Group Two discussed above) to be wandering around our fourth floor hall in his underwear banging on our doors demanding our 'services'. It become standard operating procedure to call over to the Sig Ep side, and a couple of the frat guys would come over and hustle the drunk guy out of our hallway. Well, you can see how easy it was for Drake to move in. He was just a little more security for all of us.

I think that's when Drake really learned to appreciate living with women. His 'real' dorm was a mess. Guys up all night long, and they weren't studying. They were drinking, smoking pot, screaming as well as pulling practical jokes all hours of the day and night. (One infamous night, they blocked all the doors to one floor and them simultaneously called all the room phones on that floor. Think - this is pre-cell phone, pre-computer, so the jokers trapped a whole group of unlucky college boys on their dormitory floor for several hours.) There was also a hygiene issue. We actually CLEANED the bathroom in our suite, and washed our sheets and towels. Drake swears that no one cleaned the bathroom in his boy's suite for the entire year.

That was a great year. I fell in love, and I was with my beloved constantly. (It's why '19' is my favorite number - the age I was when I first got together with Drake.) We both knew this ideal situation couldn't last because the confluence of all the events discussed above was a one time deal. By the next year the Sig Eps got a house, and the University wised up and realized that maybe we didn't need postal workers living in a dormitory in the center of campus. A definite plus that year was whenever my mother called, I was always in my dorm room. She had no clue that Drake was also there..........

The following year we moved into Crazy Betty's. We lived outside her house in one-half of her detached garage which had been converted into two apartments using a sheet of plasterboard to separate the two. This palace was rented for $55 a month, bills paid, to Drake by Crazy Betty, an alcoholic old lady with bright red hair and two inch gray roots who preferred stretch pants and polka dot halter tops in about a size 22. The pop guy delivered cases of 7-Up to her home from his truck - her mixer of choice. As the day progressed, she got drunker and drunker, and she could often be heard calling her cat "Peaches" at the top of her lungs in the dead of the night. I had a $40 a month dorm room that year - which I never slept at. It didn't take my mother long to discover I was living in SIN, and she wasn't going to rest until she had corrected that situation. I held out for several months against her incessant rage and horror, but ultimately I caved.

Thus, on Good Friday (April 9th, 1971), Drake and I got up and drove to Gainesville, Texas and were married in by a fat, sweating Justice of the Peace in the county courthouse. The ceremony took less than 5 minutes. We got married because I was pressured into it, and Drake couldn't stand then (or now) to see me so torn apart and miserable. We went to Texas because Drake was too young to get married in Oklahoma - you had to be 21, and he wasn't. The biggest lesson we both learned that year was to never, ever let anyone push us into something we don't want to do. We both now agree wholeheartedly that we got married much too young, but at the time it seemed the thing to do.

For a long time I felt cheated out of a wedding. With 40 years under my belt, looking back it was actually easier to elope considering the family storms going on, and we had the wedding we could afford. $15 for the Justice of the Peace and the license, $10 for the wedding ring (mine, we could only afford one), and $7 for the Dairy Queen meal prior to the wedding. We even ate in the car. I was pretty depressed on the way back to Norman. My new husband's refrain was: "My parents are going to kill me." I think we were both stunned by what we had done.

I was almost in tears when we pulled into the parking space outside Crazy Betty's. Fortunately, Rick (the guy who lived in the other half of the garage and who has been a lifelong friend) was sitting on the hood of his car enjoying the Spring afternoon. When he discovered that we had gotten married, he went into action. He planned an impromptu party complete with wedding gifts and a wedding supper with our close friends. And, late, late that night, we were serenaded with songs and banging pots and pans in an old-fashioned shivaree. Fortunately, they decided Drake didn't need kidnapping, and everyone just had one more drink before toddling off. That supper and party went a long way to easing my feelings about a lack of wedding celebration. This is my only wedding picture - taken a week after our marriage in the driveway of my parents' home - returning to the family fold - legal at last. I'm showing off my invisible plain gold band wedding ring in the photo.

With such a start, and at such a young age, I sometimes think it's a miracle that we have such a happy marriage. Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to achieve one. I was raised in "They lived happily ever after land." Boy, it didn't take long for that fantasy to evaporate. I also quickly discovered that problems were not solved in 22 minutes (the length of a half an hour TV program), and that I had to learn how to fight productively so we both came out winners from inevitable conflicts. I have become gratified that the initial basis of our relationship was friendship rather than romance, and as we progressed down the marriage highway realized that bedrock of friendship has held us together when life has thrown us those unlooked for curve balls and littered our path with not only pot holes but giant sinkholes.

I don't have Elizabeth Barrett Browning's gift of writing the poetry of love, but I feel blessed by having a husband that is not only my truest friend but also my ardent lover and my source of quiet, constant, unchanging support. In the vernacular - he loves me like a rock, and he always has my back. It hasn't hurt anything that he's about the smartest guy I ever met, and he adores me. Also, he picks up after himself, after me, and makes our everyday life run smoothly with a minimum of fuss. I guess I contribute the spontaneity, the optimism, and the ability to make him laugh.

In 42 years we've run the gamut of every emotion you can name from the highest high to the lowest low. We've had times that it would have been easier to give up on one another and move on. We've had times that are so good we got giddy with happiness and delight. I don't have any secret formula. I do know that to be successful at this marriage business, it takes both parties refusing to give up on the ideal. You have to believe in your heart of hearts that no matter what, you are better together than apart, and you just keep trying your hardest to make that true.

Since I married when I was a child, who I am today was formed by my unique relationship with Drake. Sarah Lynn, our daughter, used to feel excluded at times because we were so in tune with one another. When you grow up together, my experience has been that you grow together. As my friends know, I really don't care what anyone else thinks about who I am, what I believe, or what I do. However, everyone also knows there is one exception - I've always cared about what Drake thinks and feels. To let him down or disappoint him is to let myself down.

I am the most fortunate of people. I am loved without reservation, and I can give love back without reservation. On some days 40 years seems like an eternity, but on most days it feels like a nano-second (whatever THAT is). All I really know is that my life has been enriched in thousands of ways by sharing it with Drake.

Happy 40th Anniversary, my darling.

For those who wonder what I'm getting for my anniversary - how does a month in New York City sound? Works for me, and the blogs will be great.