OK, so why all this stuff about us? Tomorrow will be our anniversary. 59 years ago, we vowed to love, honor and obey. These vignettes are about an average married couple. Our story isn’t much different than most, but it was a special life to us. As we wind down this journey of ours, it seems like this is one way I can express my love for this man. We’ve had our share of problems, disagreements, anger, frustration, loss, unwillingness to budge. At the same time, we’ve shared joy, peace, contentment, blessings, a common faith and a lot of laughs. As you look at these pictures of us throughout the years, you’ll see that both of us enjoyed our time together, even when things weren’t always running smoothly. We both wore many hats. His hats were all indicative of who he was, while mine often masked what was going on inside. His visual appearance showed a confident, strong, handsome individual, while I took years to come out of my shell. Thanks to God, He brought us together to help each other through anything that life threw at us.

I have a million funny stories that happened during our 59 years together. I’ll give you a sampling of just a few. When I was a young mom, I became a Tupperware dealer. In those days, we had to travel to our host’s home and put on a show. I’ve always been up for that. I was driving an older car with my huge bag of products in the back seat. I’d have to drive across a long bridge, leading into St. Paul. My car began to overheat. This is before the age of cell phones and mass murderers. I sat there for a while, wondering if I should get my bag of goodies and walk to my destination. I thought about jumping off that bridge for a brief second. Thankfully, a stranger stopped and offered to help me. He said he would drive me to my destination, and I could call my husband from there. I was desperate, so I agreed. This guy was being a good Samaritan, but he could have been planning something sinister. As we drove, he told me he had a trunk full of frozen meat. He wondered if I would be interested in purchasing any. I replied that I didn’t have the money to buy anything, but I did have a whole bag of containers he could purchase to store his meat. I arrived safely. My car sat on the bridge until it could be towed, and I sold a lot of Tupperware that night.

Between the two of us, we could take our show on the road and create a lot of laughter in a not-so-funny world. As I said, he wore many hats in his life. One of his favorites was a fedora that made him look like Indiana Jones. He was working as a naturalist at the time. Often, as he would lead young children on guided nature tours, he would hear the Indiana Jones theme song being hummed behind him. One child asked him if he was a paleontologist, and Paul replied, “No, son, but I guess you could call me an old dinosaur.” In his years of advertising, there were countless stories of photo shoots gone awry – a cobra coming out of a basket – A turtle being photographed with a tiny helmet on its head. Trips into the Wind River Mountains to get the perfect shot of a seaplane gliding across a glacial lake, surrounded by towering pine trees – only to get stranded and lose the pack animals. Always an adventure, turned into a memorable story. One of those stories turned into an interesting situation as Paul and the photographer sat in a restaurant talking about shooting the mom and dad that day and planning to shoot the kids later. Can you imagine what people must’ve thought?

We’ve created some wonderful memories over this span of years. Many of them are hilarious, always mixed with a measure of humor and love. Most of those years were spent growing into one person – one mind – with one God. As a marriage matures, we can look back and see our failures, lift each other out of the pits, rely on each other for a good laugh, muddle through the good and the bad. These days, we find humor in the feral cats that inhabit our neighborhood. He still makes me laugh when he talks like Donald Duck. We find joy in recalling some of those old memories. We laugh at ourselves as we lean on each other to get from one place to the other. Good marriages don’t just happen. They take a huge amount of work, compromise, giving in, love and having a common faith. Even then, you aren’t guaranteed a perfect life together. God gives us challenges along the way, that always seem to draw us closer to Him. Laughter can make those challenges a lot easier too.