Forty-Four

Time sure flies, doesn't it? It was forty-four years ago today that the ex-wife(see blog post 12/15/13) and I tied the knot. And do you know how I remember the number? It's because my favorite baseball player, Henry Aaron, wore number 44. It's a man thing.
 When a I awakened today the condo was empty. I thought that my partner might have gone to Mass without me which would have torqued me off. Then she got home and announced she'd had her eyebrows done. Thank everything good and proper I'm not a woman. When my brows get too thick I run a razor blade over them. At any rate, we'll do what forty-four year marrieds do: go to dinner, come home, then hug each other goodnight. She'll lie in bed and look at Net Flix movies and I'll assume the couch position and watch football bowl games. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
December 27, 1969 was your normal Iowa day; 2,000 degrees below zero with an eighty inch snowfall hitting the ground. I was in charge of renting the morning coats for my best men and groomsmen. It turned out to be a slight problem because I made the order four months before the wedding. Three of the guys had put on massive weight. The Fat Man slipped into his coat and ripped the sleeve. The Deuce tried to button the top one and it popped. Burly's waist had grown by leaps and bounds, so much so that his pants were held together by the zipper. Another of the fellas had forgotten his black patent leather shoes. Nothing looks more stupid than being on the church altar wearing brown ones.
It all came together, though. We had to drive forty miles from Boone, Iowa to St. Augustine's Catholic Church in Des Moines for the wedding. I don't remember much about the actual ceremony except right toward the end when I leaned over to my new wife and asked, "Are we married yet"?
If you lived in Iowa in winter where do you think you would honeymoon? Most people would opt for the Bahamas. We would have been better off trying to sneak into balmy communist Cuba. I have to preface by writing that I was a high school basketball coach and was only allowed four days before I had to get back to my team. But, surely, I could have come up with a better place than Denver, Colorado.
My greatest memory of the trip: I rented a car so we could drive to the top of Pikes Peak. We got half way up, I got scared, made a U-turn and drove back down.
Nothing has changed much. I've been making U-turns ever since.