Thursday, April 10, 2014

Seventy Years Married


This photo was taken when my parents were courting. The car is my mother's -  new Chevrolet she bought with her earnings as a registered nurse.  She used to tell the story that this car was from the last batch off the assembly line in Detroit before they stopped producting cars and began producing machines needed for the war effort... and the doctors she worked with kept trying to buy it from her, but she wouldn't sell it.

They were married April 10, 1944.  They celebrate this anniversary on the other shore.

Here's a poem I wrote about them a few years ago:
 
T


Corot Blue

puckered with clouds,
Damask wards off rain
Father Hopkins, lick ink into my pen
shake blue over paper.

My parents’ wedding day
Cold and blustery in 1944
Outside the rectory of Saint Agnes Parish
In the brittle afternoon sun.
My mother holding her hat on her head,
Shivering in her new suit.
No wedding gown for the non-Catholic ceremony
Of thirtysomethings in the rectory.
My father dapper happy in a new dark suit
So glad she said yes.




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