I scanned a lot of old pictures a few years ago to put on a digital picture frame for my mother. I was going through some of them Friday and found this one, which shows my brother Henry and me (I’m the one on the left) and, coincidentally, the gardenia I mentioned in an earlier post. The gardenia is right behind us. It looks like it’s at least six feet tall.

Mark, Henry, Gardenia

From more than a half a century away, these seem like pictures of someone else. I remember a lot of things from those days, but even the memories seem to be someone else’s. I was probably around seven here, so my brother was around 10. My parents would have been in their 30’s. Today I think of people that age as kids.

When I see pictures like these, I don’t see me and my family at that age, I see the entire history of the Paris family, from the young mother and father with two little boys to the aged parents who die and leave two old men behind. I see all the big events that shaped their lives, and, as you probably know, bad things seem to leave stronger memories than good things. It’s like watching a movie you’ve seen many times before, so you know what’s going to happen next. You want to call out to the characters, “No! Don’t do it!” But, of course, you can’t. It’s all going to happen again, the good and the bad, played out in my memory.

Memory is like a scolding parent trying to keep you from getting into trouble. It’s not there to make you happy, it’s there to keep you from touching that hot stove again. So looking at the old pictures I scanned is a melancholic experience. It takes an effort of will to shut up the nagging part of the brain. Yes, yes, I know, the parents die in the end, but in the meantime, let us have some fun, for dog’s sake.

Updated: See below

My parents were married 70 years ago today on November 23*, 1943, right in the middle of the United State’s participation in WW II.

I don’t have many pictures of them together during the years before and after they got married. I have posted a couple, but this is my favorite. I’m not sure when or where it was taken, but I think it was after they were married because I think I can see a ring on my mother’s ring finger. I guess it was after the war, possibly when they lived in Akron, Ohio.

Bo and Doris sitting on a tree

They were young when they got married. My father had turned 26 in August, and my mother wouldn’t be 21 until January. Today I think of people that age as kids.

Here is a really blurry picture of my mother lying on a bed. It’s possible this was taken in one of the disreputable apartments they had to live in while my father continued his military training.

Lounging around

She’s just a kid.

The only time I ever did anything for them on their anniversary was for their 50^th. I was living in Huntsille, Al. On that day at work I called a florist in Rome and ordered 50 roses for them. My mother said they thought the delivery guy would never stop bringing in roses.

They had been married 56 years when my father died.

It’s hard for me to internalize the fact that they got married that long ago. Of course I showed up only about six and a half years later in 1950, so I have memories that go back almost that far, uncertain though they may be. But since my mother died earlier this year, they both seem to be fluttering away like a yellowed newspaper clipping that slips out a car window. They are disappearing into a faded and dim history, and they are going fast. I can remember them but I can’t hold on to them.

At the same time, distance and my own age let me think of them not as Mother and Daddy, but as individuals who had a life independent of me. (Despite the fact that I am the center of the universe, they were around and doing things before I even existed.) That’s one reason I like to look at old photographs of them, long before they got old and sick and weary.

Maybe what Joni Mitchell sang is true: You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

* My parents had a good-natured, running disagreement about the date of their wedding anniversary. My mother always thought it was on November 22 or 24, but my father said it was on November 23. Or maybe she thought it was November 23. I can’t remember.

UPDATE

I had intended to call or email my brother before I wrote this post to ask whether he remembered the true date of our parent’ anniversary, but I waited around until it was too late. I spoke to him today (Nov 23) and it he said he would check to see whether he could find their marriage certificate. He did.

The evidence

It turns out that I got sucked into the running disagreement. Their marriage license shows that they were married on November 24, 1943. So, please reread this post on Sunday, November 24.

It is a little strange that the license says “as appears on record in my office in Marriage Record book … April 1946.” That’s three and a half years after they were married. Did they lose the original license? Did they not get it when they were married? Did the marriage record book have a mistake, and the true date was, say, November 23? Was there some delay in getting the information to the county ordinary’s office? Did my mother mistakenly fix November 23 in her mind during the three years they apparently didn’t have a license? I guess we’ll never know.

By the way, the name of the county ordinary at the bottom of the license is Harry Johnson. I went to school with his son, Harry Johnson Jr.

When I posted about our vacation to Colorado I mentioned that my mother and father had gone horseback riding at the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs during World War II. I thought I remembered some pictures of when my father was stationed at Camp Carson (now Fort Carson), and I found a few.

Here is a not particularly good photo of my mother on horseback.

My mother on horseback

I’m not certain this was taken at the Garden of the Gods. I seem to remember other old photos that show the location better, but I couldn’t find them on my laptop. Maybe they’re on our home computer. But the only place my parents talked about riding horses together was at the Garden of the Gods, so maybe that’s where this is.

Here’s my father at the top of Pike’s Peak, where the Manitou and Pike’s Peak Railway stops.

My father at the Pike’s Peak cog railway

There’s no question about where this one is. The Pike’s Peak elevation shown on the sign is a little lower than the 14,114 or 14,115 feet given in most sources today. Here is my mother at the same place.

My mother at Pike’s Peak

The cog railway still operates at Pike’s Peak, although they no longer use this type of engine and car.

The old steam engine

Here it is at the top.

Train at the top of the mountain

I wasn’t sure the pictures of my mother and father were at the top of the mountain until I found the photo of the engine and car at the terminus.  You can see the Pike’s Peak altitude sign at the upper right in this photo. Leah and I took the cog railway to the top a few years ago. The current train stops at a structure with a snack bar and gift shop. It wasn’t there 70 years ago.

My father’s uniform includes a Sam Browne belt, which the Wikipedia article on Sam Brown belts says the Army eliminated in 1940. I don’t think the article is correct. My mother looks like she might be at least a little cool because she’s clenching her fists, but she’s not doing anything obvious like pulling her coat tighter or hunching her shoulders. So I assume the weather was perhaps cool, but not cold. My parents were married in November 1943, and after that my mother accompanied my father during his training in the western US. I am pretty sure she didn’t go out West prior to that. It would have almost certainly been pretty cold in Colorado Springs in November or later in the winter, and the 104^th Infantry Division left for Europe in late August 1944, so my guess is that these pictures were taken in the summer of 1944 before my father shipped out for Europe. And here he is, wearing a Sam Browne belt, part of which we still have.

My father is wearing a garrison or side cap here with his dress uniform. This particular military headgear has a vulgar slang name that I won’t mention. My father never used that term, and I’m not sure where I heard it.

We have other pictures of my father in uniform in the 1940’s, as well as some of his actual uniforms from the 1960’s when he was in the Army Reserves. I think Army uniforms from those days are much sharper than modern uniforms, with or without Sam Brown belts.

Did you know that the US Army is going to a blue uniform? Blue, not green or tan or khaki. Blue, like the Air Force and the Navy wear. An Army website that’s full of the jingoistic jargon common in the Army today says that the blue uniform “links today’s warriors to their heritage and connects them to warriors past.” I think a blue uniform, and the jargon that accompanies it, would have disgusted my father and the soldiers he served with. I’m pretty sure they didn’t consider themselves “warriors” and I don’t think they would have felt it necessary to boost their egos by calling themselves that. I suspect that “GI” worked just fine for them. Did you know that theater missile defense systems are not meant to protect front-line soldiers? They’re intended to protect valuable assets in the rear, like supplies, air bases, and, coincidentally, generals, who typically sit well to the rear of the action. One of the very first Allied deaths in the D-Day invasion was a general. That wouldn’t happen today, so I imagine the generals need something to convince themselves and others that they’re really soldiers. I mean warriors.

Well, I don’t know where that came from, but I feel better now.