On August 24, 1936, Norman N. Busk and Evelyn Allegra Anderson got hitched.

My father was twenty; my mother twenty-one.  Being what was considered an older woman at the time, she had refused to marry him until he turned twenty because she didn’t want to be considered a “cradle robber.”  His birthday was on August 21, and she was due to turn 22 on August 30, and so, for those few days in August, including their wedding day, they were only a year apart in age rather than two.

Of the eighty years between then and now, my folks were together for sixty-eight of them. My mother came from a fairly large, boisterous family; my father from a small dysfunctional one.  I have no kind words to spare for either of my paternal grandparents.  They were grim and resentful people. For ten years while my father and his two brothers were growing up, they had to pass messages back and forth between their parents because Grandpa and Grandma Busk weren’t speaking to each other at the time. They both knew how to carry a grudge in spades!

I think it’s remarkable that, coming from that background, my father, as an eighteen-year-old, was smart enough to look at my mother and say, “That’s the one for me.”

They were a matched pair. They loved to play practical jokes on one another; they loved to laugh. They believed in working hard and living frugally. They both loved to travel. And when my father’s health situation made a move from South Dakota to Arizona a necessity, they set off on that journey, shoulder to shoulder, leaving everything familiar behind and starting over in Bisbee, Arizona.

My mother never forgave my father for dying first and leaving her behind. As far as she was concerned, they were supposed to go together.

Today, in my memory at least, they’re together again, sitting at opposite ends of the Formica breakfast table in the kitchen on Yuma Trail, with our father “talking loud” if one of us kids got out of line and with my mother dealing out pairs of pieces of toast from the toaster parked on the kitchen stool next to her place.

They were good people. Salt of the earth people. Only six of their seven children remain, but I think I speak for all of us when I say that we were fortunate to have them for as long as we did.

So Happy Anniversary, Norman and Evie.

You done good!