Tomorrow, I will celebrate my fortieth wedding anniversary. I’m not sure that many people would have bet on that milestone actually coming to pass since I was only twenty and my fiancé only twenty-one when we tied the knot. We were high school sweethearts who got together in the early days of our junior year at North Mecklenburg High School, dated throughout that year and the next, then broke up for nine months as we started college in August of 1983.
During that nine months of dating someone else, I figured out the grass was not greener on the other side, or over the septic tank, as Erma Bombeck once claimed. I was lucky when Darryl welcomed me back in March 1984. That July, at an Optimist Club family picnic at Latta Plantation Park, he asked me to take a walk along Mountain Island Lake while the burgers and hotdogs were being grilled in the picnic shelter. On a bench by the water, he popped the question. To his “Will you marry me?” I laughed and said, “Sure!” as I had a hundred times before. Then he pulled out a ring box with a beautiful half carat diamond in it! I was thrilled! I’ll never forget walking back to the picnic shelter and finding one of the Optimist men giving a welcome speech. I silently reached around my seated mother and held my left hand in her face. She turned and looked up at me, then asked, “Whose is that?”
Mama was convinced that I would not finish college if I got married in my sophomore year. And it was really important to her that I go to college. I think she was somewhat living vicariously through me. College had not been an option for her. She had married at seventeen … not pregnant, mind you … as much to escape a dysfunctional family situation as to marry into a family, The Cartners, who seemed perfect to her. She had finished high school, as hard as that was, while working and playing house with my Dad. At twenty-one she got pregnant with my older brother. From then on, working a full time job at work and a second full time job as a wife and mother, dreams of an extended education were out of the question. My entire life, she stressed the importance of a college education and told me how much easier things might have been for her if she had had the opportunities my brother and I would have to get one. There was never any question about whether we would go to college. I promised her that day of our engagement that I would finish school, no matter what. Not only did I live up to that promise, I completed my degree with a major in English and a minor in Sociology in three and a half years.
I have to say that Mama was disappointed that I chose to stay in the printing business that my father and I had started on the side in 1984 upon my graduation from UNCC. I think the reasons were twofold. She had been an employee of her father’s business, A & H Stained Glass, from her teens until her father suddenly died of a heart attack when he was forty-six and she was almost twenty-two. Her schizophrenic mother from whom she was estranged sold the business out from under her and her siblings, contributing to a life-long rift between her and her mother. Mama had picked herself up, dusted herself off, and become a success in spite of the setback. She would end up having a very successful thirty year career with the textile dye division of BASF Corporation. Being a woman without a college degree in a male-dominated business world from 1965 through 1995 she had worked her tail off to achieve a management position that allowed her to retire in her mid-fifties. She wanted me to be even more successful and to have an easier rise than she had. She expected big things from me. I think she came to be proud of CRC Printing Co. as the business took off and was still going strong when we lost her too young, just shy of her sixty-second birthday. But at the time I graduated from college, she wanted bigger things for me.
Don’t get me wrong. Both of my parents loved Darryl. They had been disappointed when we broke up … to an extent. I was young. Too young in their opinion to be making decisions with lifelong consequences. But they recognized that Darryl was a great guy. They appreciated that he seemed to like to spend time with our family, that he respected the strict rules they laid out for me, that he was a hard worker, that he was kind and loving to their only daughter. Mama could see the guy I dated during our breakup was not in Darryl’s league, but she was smart enough to let me figure that out on my own. To say they were glad when Darryl and I got back together was an understatement.
When the initial shock of the engagement reveal wore off in a few weeks, Mama threw herself into helping me plan the wedding. Those vivid memories of dress shopping, picking out invitations and flowers, and planning for the big day are still some of my fondest of times with Mama. Since I always wanted to be like her, I followed in her footsteps and did something I have come to regret. When she and my Dad married at seventeen and eighteen they could not afford a reception, so they had a cake-cutting after their rehearsal dinner with just the wedding party and their immediate families in attendance. I insisted on the same set-up for a couple of reasons. Not only was it WWJD (“What Would Joan Do” … or what she had done), but I also saw as an added bonus the fact that Darryl and I could leave immediately after our one o’clock wedding and head for our honeymoon in Gatlinburg, TN. As I got older, I came to regret not having that reception Mama tried to get me to do. Though it would have cost them more money than the simple cake-cutting with my closest friends and family, she saw the whole picture and, I think, knew I would come to regret not having that larger celebration where everyone who blessed us with their presence that day could mingle and congratulate us. I see now how selfish it was to run off for our honeymoon right after the ceremony. I’ve often wondered what others thought of that decision and wished I could go back and change that one thing. (Maybe we will have that reception for our 50th Anniversary some day.)
Our forty years of marriage would make my Mama proud. She and my Daddy had almost forty-six years under their belts when Mama passed. They had not all been easy years, I’m sure. No relationship that lasts that long in the stresses of this world is all roses. But they modeled for us a certain sticktoitiveness that showed us the value of working through things. Because of the way we were raised and the fact that both sets of our parents were still married decades in meant that we went into the union expecting and believing that we would be together forever. There’s a certain kind of peace to that promise that has helped us overcome any trials and tribulations in the past forty years.
I’m especially proud of the fact that Darryl and I have worked together for most of the forty years we have been married. Dad and I started CRC Printing Co. in a small building in the backyard of my parents’ home in June 1984, while Dad was still teaching Graphic Arts at our my alma mater, North Mecklenburg High School. Darryl had been in my Dad’s Graphics class at North when we met and had gone to work for a printshop in Charlotte after a year at Appalachian State University. In 1986, when we had been married about six months, we stole him away from Monarch Printing. We’ve worked together ever since as the business grew and relocated to an actual business address after Dad quit teaching in 1986. The fact that Darryl and I are opposites in most ways has meant that our skill sets complemented each other well, and now Darryl and I have actually run the business longer than Dad did. Dad retired in 2002 when he remarried following my mom’s death. Last week, the business celebrated it’s 41st Anniversary.
For our anniversary this year, Darryl gave me the perfect gift. Bookophile that I am, I have always dreamt of having my own library. As we stood in the Biltmore House library well over a decade ago, I vowed to one day have the closest thing I could get to that in our own home. Over the years I have stuffed bookshelves into every room of our house and filled them with my retirement plan …. loads and loads of books! There was no place too sacred for books and there are still at least one book (and usually many more) in every room of our house. Like most houses built in the 1990s, we had both a “Great Room” and a “Living Room”. The Living Room has always been pretty useless, reserved for the occasional visit from friends or family, mostly on holidays. It was filled with a mammoth entertainment center, housing a television hidden behind doors that sometimes went months or years without even being turned on and a bookshelf my Dad had built for my childhood bedroom that now housed photo albums and framed family photos that few people ever saw.
With hopes tempered by past experience with sharing some of my crazy ideas with Darryl, I threw out there about six months ago my wish to turn the formal Living Room into a Library. Expecting rolled eyes or humoring, I was pleasantly surprised when Darryl took the ball and ran with it! Within a week or so he was watching YouTube videos on building bookshelves and taking me to Ikea to look at their Billy bookcases, which seemed to be the starting point for a million Youtube DIY videos on creating the perfect bookshelf. I wasn’t impressed with the quality or the price, so he kept exploring. Soon, he was standing in my office one morning excitedly telling me that a church in Charlotte had a HUGE library shelving unit they were selling on Facebook Marketplace. The next day, it took two pickup trucks to haul the dozens of boards and frames to our house. The dream was no longer just of the pipe variety. I was getting my library!!
There have been some delays along the way. For six months or so, we battled getting the old stuff cleared out, two carpet installs after Lowes at first delivered and installed carpet that belonged in a mobile home somewhere, then took a month to file a claim with their insurance carrier before installing the right stuff. Finally, after all those frustrations, the weekend came when the shelves were to be installed. I awoke doubled over with sciatic pain, unable to stand up straight. Darryl soldiered on. I could do little more that brace a board for him as he spent all day carrying in frames and shelves and assembling them …. all eighteen feet of them … to the new Library wall in our former Living Room.
I don’t know if he knows how that Yes made me feel. It was a validation. He SEES me, KNOWS me, LOVES me, and wants to make my dreams come true. That’s priceless. Every day since the day he spent screwing in bolts and braces I have happily organized, alphabetized and categorized my books. I’ve spent hours reading and more hours admiring my collection, my retirement plan. If he’s looking for me now, he can find me in The Library with about a thousand of my friends … because he made my wish come true.
Thanks, Honey. I love you, too.
Robin's Eggs 