Twenty-Five Years

How can twenty-five years go by so fast? At this time twenty-five years ago I was dressed up in my new grey suit, white shirt, navy tie with small red dots, and matching pocket handkerchief. My brother, his wife and I were standing around in a back room of a small, grey stone church on East 19th Street in New York waiting for the ceremony to begin. It was a cold and snowy January day and I had walked to the church through six inches of snow after having a full breakfast with my father in the hotel restaurant. He had woken me at about six a.m. with a surprise phone call, to offer to buy me breakfast.

After the reception we went back to our apartment on East 34th Street and enjoyed a quiet evening (for a while) by ordering-in a Chinese dinner and watching a movie. Sometime that evening, my wife's family (parents, two sisters, their husbands, and two children) came to our door and instead of ringing the bell, quietly sang from the corridor, "I Love New York" (from the old tv commercial). We let them into the apartment since they needed a place to change their clothes (so they said) before starting the long journey through freezing rain back to Penn's Woods.

The next morning we took a cab to Penn Station and boarded our train for Williamsburg. My brother and his wife had been appalled the day before to learn that they would be on the same train (going as far as Baltimore or Washington). They chose to avoid us on the train and we began our official honeymoon.

In some ways, it's still a honeymoon, for which I'm thankful.