We Grew Up Together

Recently, I was laughing about something with my husband, and I realized with a sudden rush of giddy happiness that we still, after all these years, enjoy each other's company so, so much.  I realized (not for the first time, obviously) that we're totally in synch almost all the time: thinking similar thoughts at the same moment, caring about the same things, believing the same Truths, and finding the same things funny.  And it hit me how grateful I am that not only have I been doing life with this wonderful man--the most devoted husband and father a girl could ever dream to find--throughout my adult years (we'll celebrate our 46th anniversary in December), but I was lucky enough to know him when he was just a boy.  When we were 15, he became my best friend (as well as the only one I ever wanted to marry)...and nothing has changed in the 53 years since then.

We grew up together.  We met as freshmen in high school and started dating the summer between our freshman and sophomore years.  Married seven months after college graduation, at 22 (which today seems so much younger to me than it did back then), we started out with very little and built a life together that has surpassed any dreams I ever had for it.  Five sons, five daughters-in-law, 23 grandchildren with another on the way.  God is so good, dear readers.  So good.  I am humbled by His generosity!

I am well aware that it is not very common to start dating at 15, go away to colleges far apart from each other and spend four years in a long-distance relationship, and then make it to the finish line.  Or to the altar, that is. But we did.  We beat the odds, and I am so incredibly thankful that we did.  I didn't always feel confident that I would actually get my longed-for happily-ever-after ending, because high school sweethearts so seldom stay together for the long haul. But I did get it.  Deo gratias!

When we were seniors in college, both of our schools had big dances in the spring.  Notre Dame's senior ball was held in Chicago, in a very fancy downtown venue.  As a surprise gift to my husband, who was the only one among his friends who'd gotten engaged before graduation, his best buddies took up a collection and a whole bunch of ND guys pitched in to send me a plane ticket from Boston to South Bend.  They also paid for the tickets to the ball and our hotel accommodations--and even rented an 80's classic powder-blue tux (you might have seen one like it in the movie Dumb and Dumber), using my husband's younger brother, an ND freshman who was almost the same size and he is, as a model.  It was just incredible.  One of the guys picked me up at the airport and drove me to campus.  I came up behind my unsuspecting fiancé at the Senior Bar (it was located in an old house and has an interesting history, but that’s a post for another day), and when I put my hand on his back and he turned toward me, the look on his face when he realized I was there was just priceless.  I'm so glad someone actually thought to take a picture (this was 1980, long before the constant photo-snapping iPhone days!).

A page from one of the many scrapbooks I kept. (Now I keep one here at the blog!)

My husband and I look like a couple of babies here.  (We were!)

The funny thing is, my college friends managed to execute a similar surprise for the spring ball at our school a few weeks later.  My best college friend later told me that after she learned about my husband’s friends’ scheme (which beat them to the punch), she was afraid it would look like they were just copying.  But she said that they’d had their own surprise planned ever since we’d gotten engaged over Christmas break. So both sets of friends had come up with the same generous surprise gift for us, sending airplane tickets and all, without ever running it by each other. How lucky were we to have friends like those?!

Again, someone thought to snap a photo, just as my husband suddenly appeared in the dining hall when I was eating lunch. I couldn’t have been more flabbergasted!

I must have spent a lot of time finding and cutting sayings out of magazines for these scrapbooks!  LOL

Me: same dress that I wore for the ND ball.
Him: no powder-blue tux this time--just a nice-looking suit.

[Sigh....]  This is what happens when you get into your 60's.  You look back at when you were young and it feels like all you did was blink a few times and yikes, what happened?!  

We don't look much like the two starry-eyed, dewey-skinned creatures in those pictures anymore.  But we remember them, and how they felt; and we still feel the same way they did.  We really, really like each other.  I mean, you know, we like like each other, as the kids used to say.

We grew up together, and now we're growing old together.

Ch-ch-ch-changes, as the song goes!

 As long as we're together, it's all good.