Fifty years ago today, I was a bride. I was eighteen years old.
The love of my young life was a sailor stationed aboard the USS Canopus in Rota, Spain. I was a high school senior when we met. To me, it felt like a match made in heaven. He was six years older, gorgeous, worldly, smart, artistic, and divorced. That's why we went to Gibraltar to marry. It was 1969 and Franco was in power in Spain. Divorced people were not allowed to marry on Spanish soil, not even on an American military base in the base chapel. So we set out for British soil where they weren't so picky about such things.
As it happened, it was a Monday and the people who were married just before the weekend in the same office, by the same somewhat elderly, very British official, were John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Not that we saw them. But they did scandalize the officiating bureaucrat by showing up barefoot which he described with much indignation. Heaven forfend.
There is no remaining photographic evidence of our nuptials. They were lost somewhere in my parents' move from Spain to England. Nonetheless, I remember some small details. I was shocked to see myself referred to as a "spinster" on the marriage certificate. I did not like the dress I was wearing. It had been purchased for my HS graduation from the Base Exchange and was brown and white. Who wants to get married in brown? Was it an omen?
My family toasted us at a Chinese restaurant afterward, a treat not available where we lived. Altogether, it was a long and happy day. We took a train to Madrid for our wedding night, followed by a honeymoon hitchhiking through Spain and Morocco.
Fifty years is a long time whether or not a marriage lasts. And a relationship can outlive a marriage by a long shot. We had a son after 5 years and split up when he was a baby. Ever after, we've all been family. New marriages, more kids, many moves and life's vicissitudes haven't changed the fact that once upon a time there was love. And marriage. And fun.
I'm lucky to have had many lives in this one incarnation.
