This was taken with an automatic timer on her non digital camera propped up on a table across the room of our suite at the Ocean Creek Resort in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in May of 1984. It was a lifetime ago...and strangely, feels like last week. We had no earthly idea what we were doing, no clue what wonders lurked in our future. We were broke, or would be by the time we returned from this trip and spent our way through the wedding cash. She was a first grade teacher, and I was a struggling insurance salesman. My car was a used VW Scirocco with red fake leather seats. We would return to Richmond and spend our first year of married life in a two bedroom apartment off of Hungary Springs Road.
There were no cell phones. It was three Golden Retrievers ago. We had no children. There was no Facebook, and only three channels on our 19 inch color television, four if you counted the fuzzy and inconsistent reception of the Public Television station...channel 23 WCVE. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, and the Dallas Cowboys were actually good. Apple Computer was a niche company who nobody had ever heard of, and Amazon was a river in Brazil. If either of us had randomly started giving voice commands to someone named Alexa, we would have been declared insane.
It was a much less convenient time. Information was exceedingly more difficult to come by, and if you were serious about being informed, you took the paper...both of them, The Times Dispatch in the morning, and The News Leader at night. But, oddly, I felt I understood the world better. Now, everything there is to know is at my fingertips, yet I’m more confused than ever.
But, you know what? Not everything has changed. That girl sitting next to me is still as hot and beguiling as ever. I didn’t fully understand just what I had back then. Now I do and can hardly believe it. The picture is grainy and a bit faded. I like that. It’s as if it’s holding something back from us...No, I’m not clear and precise. Allow room for mystery...
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