Sunday morning music

 

Yesterday, March 15th, was the fifteenth anniversary of my marriage to my dear lady wife.

I never expected to marry, and she had given up much thought of it.  We were both struggling with the debilitating long-term effects of serious injury.  When a mutual friend, Oleg Volk, introduced us to each other via e-mail, we had no thought of anything except, "Oh, a new person.  Sounds interesting."  However, within days, we were phoning each other and exchanging longer and longer e-mails.  I think both of us realized, in less than a week, even though we'd never met each other, that this had the potential to be something very special.

I flew up to Alaska to meet her for the first time a month later.  I took with me an engagement ring, about which we'd consulted and jointly selected on a Web site.  When I left to come home, two days later, she was wearing it.  (I think we blew Oleg's mind at the speed with which everything happened . . . not at all what he'd been expecting!)

Fifteen years into our marriage, and we're still very much in love.

I wanted to select a piece of music that expressed our bond, and thought about my parents.  They met when my father fell on top of my mother in a Birmingham bus during an air raid in 1940 - not your average romantic meetup at all!  He walked her home, very apologetic, and allegedly proposed to her at her front door.  She indignantly refused, but did agree to go out with him for supper that evening.  They had more supper dates as and when he could get leave from the Royal Air Force, and he kept proposing, and she kept refusing . . . until one evening he told her that he was being posted overseas, so if she said "No" again, he wouldn't bother her any more.  She said "Yes".

Almost as soon as they were wed, Dad shipped out in a convoy to Singapore in mid-1941.  He was taken off his ship in Durban, South Africa, to help the South African Air Force solve a couple of engineering problems.  The rest of his draft landed in Singapore - just in time to be taken prisoner by Japanese forces in early 1942.  Very few of them survived their prison camps to come home again.  He went on to be posted to the Western Desert campaign, then the Dodecanese campaign, then back to England.  He was reunited with my mother more than three years after saying goodbye to her.  Despite problems, and realizing that wartime pressures might have led to a marriage they otherwise would not have made, they stuck it out, and were married for 64 years until she died in the early noughties.  He followed her a few years later.

I'd like my wife and I to echo their fidelity and commitment to each other;  so, to celebrate our own anniversary, here's a commemoration from the World War II years.  Vera Lynn recorded the "Anniversary Waltz" in 1941.  I'll embed it here in memory of my parents (may God rest their souls), and for my own wife.

Soppy and sentimental, by modern standards?  Perhaps . . . but just as real for all that.

Peter