August 6, 2013: Happy Anniversary, Tanga Bea Turner McCullough!!

Tomorrow marks 36 years of marriage for Tanga and me. Yes, you read that correctly, 36, as in three dozen or one-fourth of a gross. I know, we don’t even look 36 years old, let alone old enough to be married so long. I would not believe it either, had I not been there for the whole blooming thing. It turns out we got married on the 32^nd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. If you find something funny in the connection between our marriage and that day, you have a warped sense of humor- and welcome to the club.

I don’t believe it would be an exaggeration to say there were 250 people at our wedding. It was held at Tanga’s home church and everyone in the general area must have felt sorry for her. Not very many made their way up from South Carolina or Beattyville, Kentucky, the places I had called home; only family and my best man. One of my groomsmen did not show up and I have not heard from him to this day. Our friendship was the only obvious casualty of my marriage.

Ten days later, after our honeymoon to Bardstown, Kentucky; to see the Stephen Foster story, the day we moved into our first apartment; I was standing at the sink doing something, maybe washing dishes with a radio beside me playing music, when they interrupted to say Elvis had died. There was something surreal about Elvis dying just as we got started in marriage. Again, any connection you might make between the death of the king and us moving into our first apartment would be in poor taste.

We lived in Kentucky two more years after our marriage, moved to Terre Haute, Indiana in August of 1979, and we have not lived in Kentucky since. I think it is a coincidence that Kentucky has struggled since we left. In 1978, Democrat Walter Dee Huddleston won 61% of the vote to the 37% won by Republican Louis Guenthner, in the U.S. Senate race for Kentucky. In 1980, Democrat Wendell Ford won the U.S. Senate seat in Kentucky with 65% of the vote to Republican Mary Foust’s 35%. I refuse to take the blame for the change that has occurred since.

Things have gone a little better on the basketball front. Kentucky won a NCAA title in 1958 and 1978, while we were there. In the 34 years we have been gone, they have won three titles. In the 65 years since they won their first NCAA basketball title, Kentucky has won seven more, which comes to around one every nine years or so. The 2014 title will give them a total of nine in 67 seasons, or one every seven and a half years. Not bad for a state missing two of its biggest fans.

We have three couple friends – now with children, children-spouses and a few other friends- from college that I am pretty sure, not a single year has gone by without us seeing them at least once and for the last twenty-five years or so, at least twice; and in the last ten years or so, at least four times. We have joked about us possibly moving in together and starting our own commune, but that would probably not work, since Tanga and I are the only communists in the bunch.

Tanga and I had a daughter on the second-to-last day of 1981. She, like us, is not one to stay close to home. For the last three April-through-Septembers she has worked as a U.S. Park Ranger in Alaska, 2011 and 12 in Skagway and this year in Glacier Bay. Back in 2002 she traveled to the Normandy, France area for a travel study. In 2003, she went to London and saw something like 15 plays in 14 days, some of them at the Globe theater. In 2004 she spent the summer backpacking from Ireland to Rome and in 2004-5 she spent the school year teaching English in Manosque, France.

She and I got to travel to London and Paris in 2007 and Tanga and I were in Cambridge for 7-7-2005, when terrorists blew up the tube and a couple of busses. Tanga and I spent our thirtieth anniversary, in 2007, at Cancun, Mexico. That was the only time we actually took a trip for our anniversary.

Our marriage has lasted through Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama and hopefully will last at least through Clinton II, if not Clinton III – Chelsea. It has lasted through nothing but bleak years of Cincinnati Reds teams, except for 1990. We have watched nine Olympic games, including 1980 - the U.S. boycott year. We have watched 36 sets of Super Bowl commercials and halftimes, neither of us all that taken with the actual games.

We have lived through the Jonestown Massacre, John Lennon’s assassination, Reagan being shot, Hurricanes Hugo, Andrew, Katrina and Sandy – and a host of lesser ones, the first Gulf War, the roaring nineties, the tech bubble bursting, September 11^th, the Iraq War, the housing bubble bursting, the great recession, the election of the first African American to the White House and unfortunately, we are still living through whatever you call the mess in Afghanistan.

We have attended the funerals of her wonderful mother Edna, my wonderful father Paul, her 44 year-old brother Roger and her brother Roger’s wife, son and two grandsons; the weddings of a niece and nephew – my sister Cathy’s two; another niece – Brenda’s daughter and that of her brother and my brother as well.

We have lived in Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, New Jersey, Tennessee again, North Carolina and back to Tennessee. We have probably driven around two million miles between us, a number inflated by the fact that she and I have lived 65 and 55 miles respectively, from our work, for the last nineteen years or so.

We have moved twelve times in 36 years, counting moving into Lewis number nine, the efficiency apartment at Morehead where we had just arrived when Elvis died. If our house, which is currently on the market, sells; that will be our thirteenth move.

Suffice it to say, a lot can happen in 36 years and it has, but we are still around and ready for what the next 36 might bring. No one can predict what will transpire in three-dozen years, but if we could, that would not be nearly as much fun, would it? Who knows, maybe nothing much will happen so that when I sit down to write about our second 36 years, the piece will be much shorter.