HAPPY ANNIVERSARY IF YOU'RE LISTENING

Today is my Mom and Dad's anniversary. They have been dead over three years now, but I still observe it in my mind. It's an easy date to remember because they got married on Groundhog Day. They didn't plan it that way and I don't even know if people paid any attention to Groundhog Day in 1929. But for a long time now, it's been easy to remember when February 2 rolls around because TV, radio, and the newspapers have big features about Punxatawny Phil and his shadow, or lack of one. Then I think, "Oops, their anniversary is today--I better get a card." They never made a big deal of the day themselves, never exchanged cards or flowers or candy or anything, but they always REMEMBERED it. They would say, "It's Groundhog Day," and we would know they were remembering the day they got married, and we would take them out to the cafeteria or something.

If you had been there in 1929, you wouldn't have thought this marriage stood a chance. Mom was 17 and a highschool dropout, working as a telephone operator because times were hard and her family needed her wages. Dad was 20. He worked at the telephone company and didn't have a home of his own; he was a volunteer fireman because that way he could sleep at the fire station. His mother was dead and his father was an alcoholic. But Mom and Dad felt confident in the future because they had good jobs and a lot of friends, so they had no qualms at all about getting married.

They got married on their lunch hour at the Episcopal parsonage. Neither one of them was Episcopalian, but that was the closest preacher they could find. They did it on their lunch hour because they didn't want their friends to know about it. It was the custom back then, in that part of Oklahoma, for your friends to "chivaree" you on your wedding night. They would descend on the couple, interrupt their wedding night, make a lot of noise, have a party, maybe dress the guy up in some outlandish costume and drive him around town, and just generally raise all kinds of hell. Mom and Dad planned to sneak away after work and have a weekend honeymoon in a little town some 50 miles away, and they knew they couldn't do that if their friends--or at least Dad's friends--got wind of it. So that's why they got married on their lunch hour.

It worked like a charm. They had two whole days away from town, and when they came back, they were old married folks. They moved into a rooming house. They never got a chivaree. The closest thing was that Dad's friends on the police force made him climb a telephone pole and they handcuffed him to it with a "Just Married" sign. And his friends on the fire department made him go around the courthouse square with a roll of toilet paper, selling it piece by piece until it was all gone. (Yes, I know, that doesn't make any sense, but everyone thought it was hilarious.)

1929, what a time to get married. Before the year was over, the country was in the Great Depression. But they made it through the 1930's, then the 1940's, and so on until 2001 when they both just wore out and quit ticking. We gave them a big 50th Anniversary party, and then another one at 65. We had a small observation at 70, but by then we all knew they were running out of anniversaries, and time. By 2001 she was bedfast and he was on oxygen, and both of them were on home hospice care.

Not much we can do this year. I guess I could put some flowers on their graves, but I'm not really big on that, never have been. So I'll just salute Punxatawney Phil and send $50 to Meals on Wheels. That's enough to give meals to one person for a month, and I think they would like that. Happy Groundhog Day, y'all.