Setting A Good Example

This is my parents and today is their 35th wedding anniversary.

They are not toasting in this picture—which was taken a couple of weeks ago—because of their 35th wedding anniversary. They are toasting because their eldest daughter has got her life together enough to buy her first house and now she has enough garage space that they can finally make her collect all that wedding crap and college crap and high school crap and probably crap that goes back even further than high school, and have her store it in her own garage instead of theirs.

At least this is what I think they are toasting. They look very happy. They obviously don’t know yet that tomorrow they’re going to volunteer to strip their eldest daughter’s entire kitchen of wallpaper. They probably wouldn’t look so happy if they knew that.

Probably wouldn’t have been too happy to know I was going to put the above picture on the Internet either. Whoops!

What would be really good is if I had a picture of them on their wedding day to show you so we could all go “awwww!” and “Oh, weddings!” and “man, the 70s looked like a blast!” Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have anything like that to hand, but what I do have, for some reason, is a picture of their wedding cake.

Actually it’s a picture of a picture of their wedding cake (and what a cake it is!), which my mother found a few months ago. (Better than the actual wedding cake she found last year, a slice of which my grandmother had kept in its souvenir wedding box as a memento, and no, I’m not even kidding, IT WAS WEDDING CAKE FROM 1975. A little dry and disintegrated, sure, but fruit cake keeps remarkably well...)

I hear often of people who don’t want to get married---who don’t believe in marriage, maybe---because their parents got divorced. They can’t trust it, they say: they don’t have a good picture of it, they don’t have a good example. For me, though, it’s the opposite: one of the reasons I knew I did want to get married---apart from, you know, taking a shine to my husband and all that---was because my parents have shown me, for the last three decades, what a marriage should look like. Ah, that sounds cheesy, I know, but it’s true. Happy anniversary, mum and dad: thanks for giving me a marriage to aspire to.