On a snowy night in my hometown of Chicago, on March 12, 1988, I walked slowly to my groom, to an acoustic version of the Beatles’ "Imagine," played by a very cool trio. As I write this in the autumn of 2023, I reflect on the many unimaginable experiences we have shared and how many imagined dreams have come true.
When we married, I was 33 and he was 31. I, with long brown hair tucked into my sister’s veil worn four years earlier. He, with wild brown curls and incandescent blue eyes. I had not known him that long although I knew I wanted a long life with him.
We first met at a bar in Washington, D.C. On a third date at a chilly restaurant, he saw me shivering, took off his sweater and handed it to me. It smelled of musk and of him, and I got warm way beneath my skin. Two years later, he was in a tuxedo and I was in a white satin dress and satin heels studded with rhinestones.
As the ceremony began, my imagination bloomed with the beauty of the aisle lined with stalks of red and white roses — and with the love I felt for everyone in the room.
As we walked back up that aisle, officially husband and wife, I imagined we would still be together into old age. This, while another favorite song of ours played, again from the Beatles, "When I’m 64."
The Beatles Married Me
The bounty of what has transpired since our wedding night is unimaginable — lots of wonder, lots of sorrow, lots of endurance. During the ensuing decades, we raised four sons, lost four parents, navigated illnesses, and felt the lonely sting of an emptying nest. We have fought and forgiven and endured pockets of malaise, always grateful that the answer is “yes” to these lyrics from one of our wedding songs: “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64" (although I do most of the cooking).
We have come to know that we need each other, our history holders, through sickness and loss, through crazy years of juggling four children very close in age. Shortly after turning 39, I had birthed four boys in three years — twins made that happen.
It was unimaginable as a giddy bride, aglow with youth and a sinewy figure and raging hormones, that soon, too soon, I would be part of a tribe (wearing stretch pants on a different body). Soon, too soon, the love for one husband was diffused among five people. Soon, too soon, I would be sleepless and cranky, watching Big Bird at dawn under a pile of kids, in my polyester gray bathrobe, splattered with mashed peas and breast milk.
As the years unfolded and toddlers turned into teens who turned into lanky young men out on their own, I think of our wedding songs and they still give us strength. Beyond the challenges of building a strong family, we realize how much we need each other while trying to explain the inexplicable to our tribe of millennials who are coming of age with war after war.
We tell them that the world has always been filled with chaos and carnage and somehow the generations survive. We tell them to have hope because we have hope, and that they have our undying love. (As the Beatles also reminded us in another epic song: All You Need Is Love.
John Lennon, who wrote "Imagine," loved deeply and lived too briefly with hope, embodied in these words from the song we chose as our anthem to start a marriage:
Imagine all the people