my better half
We were so young. We didn’t feel young, but I wasn’t quite 22. We were launching on that big adventure called marriage, forty-eight years ago today. Our wedding was a small affair in my mother’s home: only David’s immediate family and my extended family of cousins, aunts and uncles and grandmothers. A couple of very close friends. The wedding was at 11 AM, leaving no time for my hair to dry after washing it and putting it in curlers the night before.
My mother had made my dress and the dress of my sister, my maid of honor. Our dresses were fashionably to our knees; all the other young women were in polyester mini-skirts. David was also in polyester, a green jacket and plaid pants. The 1970s were the era of polyester. Ugh!
David was in graduate school in Illinois and I still had about ten days to finish up my undergraduate degree in Evansville, Indiana. So, we stepped from this photo into a whirlwind one-night honeymoon, then I put him on a Greyhound bus back to Normal and headed south.
It’s hard to imagine how little we had to our names in those days. That abnormal Normal summer we lived in a group home. Most of the other students had left for the break. Only John Batur, a Nigerian prince, had another room in the house, and we shared the kitchen. We were rehearsing and performing plays in a rolling repertory so Dave could finish his Master’s degree; our only plans after summer were to return to Indianapolis for my internship in public relations at the Indiana Repertory Theatre, where I pulled in the vast sum of $100 a month. David had a secondary education degree and found a job reading microfiche for a journalist at the Indianapolis Star. Then miraculously, someone called the theatre and said that there was a job opening that exactly fit David’s credentials at Greenwood Community High School on the southside of the city.
We didn’t know the Lord at that time, but over the next year both of us would be surrounded by Christians who loved us into the kingdom. That love actually saved our marriage as well. We had so little modeling of healthy marriage in our families of origin, that we were not excellent candidates for marital success. But over the course of that year, we made many friends who showed us what marriage could be, specifically Christian marriage. We hung in there. Some of those people are still in our lives today.
And here we are now. My husband is my best friend. We’ve raised two amazing children and have five delightful grands. We love Jesus, love each other and have a marvelous story to tell. God has blessed us, and I am so grateful.
So happy anniversary to my better half.
Love, Liz
