It’s two weeks until Surfer Dude and Dudette return to South Carolina for their wedding. For a week our family and hers will come together to frolic on the South Carolina coast. We will lie in the sun, eat too much and spend lots of time together. Fortunately, we already like each other and vacation together anyway, so other than the wedding part, this is not an unusual time of year for the two families to be sharing dinner and beach towels.
Yes, we know how lucky we are that all of us – and there are right many when I start to count – get along just great.
So it isn’t hard to understand how our offspring get along so well. For ten years they’ve been an item.
Dude is the kind of person who makes a plan and then sticks to it. For instance, when he was four years old, we were trying to teach him to tie his shoes. Finally, one day in frustration, he looked at me and said, “I’m not ready to learn this. I will learn this when I am five years old.” He held up five fingers to show me how old that would be.
“Are you sure you don’t want to learn that now?” I asked him. In response, he held his five fingers up again.
Several months later, on his fifth birthday, he came out of his bedroom with his shoes tied.
“Who tied your shoes,” I asked him.
“I did.”
“When did you learn to do that?” I asked as I stooped down in front of him and admired the excellent job he’d done tying his shoes.
“I told you I would learn how when I was five years old.”
“Happy Birthday, Sweetie.” I gave him a hug and tucked the incident away in the mental file on him. This was definitely an insight into the way this particular manchild would manage his life. It would come in handy to know this later on, I figured.
And so about six years ago, I asked him if he and his beloved were ever going to get married.
His reply, “We’ll get married when we’ve been going together for ten years.” My heart sank a little and realized that looking at wedding magazines was very premature.
“Ten years? You’re joking aren’t you?” (I already knew the answer but was hoping…)
“Nope. Ten years.”
I could tell he meant it because he used that same tone of voice he had when he was four years old and not ready for shoelaces.
They will have been going together almost ten years to the day when they get married later this month…longer that a lot of marriages survive these days.
So, now I am refraining from asking the next big question – “When can I expect a grandbaby to play with and teach to fish?”
If he says ten years, I will likely have a meltdown, before explaining the biology of childbearing.
And then I’ll give him a hug, go drag out his baby pictures and imagine a little Surfer Dude or Dudette running around the house.
Weddings are great!

Contact Judy Watts at 873-9424 or jwatts@journalscene.com