DownloadJune 22, 2009 issue
42 years, why knot?
By Jim BishopPage:
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I was already feeling hesitant, but as Anna and I entered the gathering space at Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community, the anxiety level really shot up.
Jim Bishop is public information officer at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va.
What have we gotten ourselves into? Who do we think we are, “preaching” to this large (over 150 people) group, many of them more experienced in the marital arena than we?
It was too late now. As guest speakers for the annual fundraising banquet of the Family Life Resource Center of Harrisonburg, Va., we were asked to address the topic, “The First 50 Years Are the Hardest.”
The moment of truth arrived. We surveyed the sea of mostly familiar faces and forged ahead.
Let’s put everything on the table, I said: Marriage is like a game of cards. It begins with a pair. He acts the joker and she the queen. He shows a diamond; she shows a flush. There’s a big shuffle, and they wind up with a full house. To which you might retort, big deal!
It has been a few years — 42, in fact — since Anna Mast and this goofy guy from Doylestown, Pa., exchanged vows — A, E, I, O and, uh, several others — of mutual involvement in each other’s lives the evening of July 22, 1967, in the sultry sanctuary of Frazer Mennonite Church near Paoli, Pa.
After a celestial honeymoon — that’s the interval between the bridal toast and the burnt toast — at a cottage in Seaside Heights, N.J., it was off to Elkhart, Ind. Anna was nursing a throbbing toothache that she didn’t tell her new husband about, not wanting to spoil the honeymoon. Our ’56 VW smoked along the Ohio and Indiana toll roads at a top speed of 35 mph. We were faced with a $400 engine repair as soon as we hit town.
Welcome to married life — no money or credit line, college debt, no extended family in our new locale — but many hopes and dreams. We set up housekeeping in a tiny, $75-a-month apartment. Cockroaches at no extra charge.
For the first five years it was just the two of us, plus one cat — a Sealpoint Siamese named Menno. Life was purrfect, so I thought.
Actually, it wasn’t. At the start of our marriage, Anna tried to be my mother — perfect housekeeper, cook, caregiver. She had to teach in the Elkhart County public school system to help pay our bills. She found it a nearly overwhelming task to do both, but she persisted.
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