Newsletter 7: The Parents’ 48th Wedding Anniversary

I’ve decided to start putting some of the best newsletter essays here on Medium, so more people can read them. You’re still better off just subscribing. This one is from June 2016, about my parents’ impending 48th wedding anniversary. (It was 45th when I wrote it.) They just closed on a place in Winterville, Georgia, so we get to have them around all the time now. We’re pretty lucky.

My parents celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary on Sunday. They were married on June 19, 1971, when my father was 22 years old and my mother was 20. They (obviously) hadn’t been dating long. Dad, raised in a military family, signed up for the Air Force and assumed he was headed to Vietnam when he met my mom at a party in her hometown of Moweaqua, Illinois, population 1,831. They obviously enjoyed each other’s company enough to stay in touch during basic training in Virginia, but — and this is the way the story is told to me, which is not necessarily the same thing as saying this is precisely how it happened — Dad split up with her during basic training because he didn’t want her to wait for him when he was in shipped to Vietnam.

(Side note: Apparently my father wrote this to my mother in a letter, explaining that, as far as he knew, he could be going to “Buttfuque, Egypt.” My mother, who was 19 after all, didn’t get the “Buttfuque” joke and spent an afternoon at the…