Back to the Future--Happy Anniversary

Today would have been my parent’s 70th wedding anniversary. They got married within days after my father returned from World War II having served in the Army Medical Core in Africa. They originally met in Washington DC several years before after my father went on active duty and my mother worked as a nurse at St Elizabeth’s Hospital. My mother kept a journal from 1938—until 1948, and many of the posts express her love for him and hoping he would return and marry her. I know very little about how he felt about her though. However, from my mother's journal it's obvious they both wrote lots of letters during that time. She also mentioned many times the frustration of not hearing anything for months, then getting 6 letters. Sometimes letters did not arrive in any particular order in that she would get one and later receive another written weeks earlier. She often referred to "snail mail" which given it was the 1940's may have made her the inventor of that phrase.

They spent their first year together at Fort Meade Maryland where exactly 367 days later I arrived. From there they went to Fort Pickett in Virginia and later on after my father's discharge from active duty they moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania where my brother was born. Since the Fleming family drugstore had been sold while he was in the army my father went to work for Peoples Drug Stores and we wound up in Bristol for a while. Then he was promoted and we moved to Danville, Virginia. The rest of my parent's married life was spent there. Unfortunately it only lasted 17 years until my father died from lung cancer. My mother never really recovered from that loss and our family life was never the same.

These days most of my friends who are around my age have also lost there parents. Except for our next door neighbors the Browns whose patriarch died 5 years before my father, I was one of the first of my friends to lose a parent at such an early age. One of my regrets is that I didn't get to spend time with my father as an adult. My mother died 17 years later when I was 33 but in some ways she disappeared many years before as I've mentioned in some previous posts. As I reflect on this anniversary though my biggest regret is that my parents did not have many more years together.