J.P. and Kay Devine are seen with an Oct. 1, 1961, ticket from the Cherokee bus to St. Louis City Hall, where they received their marriage license and were married the next day by Judge Tammany. Photo courtesy of J.P. Devine
On Oct. 1 back in 1961, I wrote this:
“At 1:46 p.m. at Yankee Stadium in New York City, in the fourth inning, Roger Maris, No. 9, hit his 61st home run in the last game of the season against the Boston Red Sox, thus beating the old record held by Babe Ruth.
“At City Hall in St. Louis that chilly afternoon, a cheer just went up in the hall as almost everyone was listening to the game on their portable radios.
“Not one eye was watching a nervous young couple who had taken the Cherokee bus to City Hall, where they would soon get their marriage license and be married the next day by Judge Tammany.”
This is that couple, no longer young, that — as everyone who reads these papers remembers — first met on an escalator in Bloomingdale’s department store one Christmas week.
So, here is that young couple today, six decades from that cold October day in St. Louis, still crazy after these years, still in love, slightly impaired by the ravages of time, but in full control of most of the selections on the cognitive menu.
A lot of calendar pages have fluttered by, and we are doing the same act, with all our best lines memorized.
Some things have changed: I shop, cook and clean between writing columns; and She plows through a mountain of books, sometimes two a week.
With COVID waiting at the treeline to grab us, we improvise. I trim her curls, do her eyebrows and nails. She manages the books.
Of course I pamper her. She deserves it.
Like so many of you, we stand at our windows like Napoléon Bonaparte and his sister, Pauline, in our enchanted cottage, firmly planted on our pine- and birch-studded Elba.
We survived eight years in apartments 10 minutes from Times Square, 28 in Hollywood, raised two successful daughters, four old English sheep dogs, two schnauzers and one cockatiel named Ms. Kramer, who will always be in our wills.
We dodged Lyme disease, flu, SARS, caterpillars, ticks and 38 winters. Fully-vaccinated, we sit counting the many colored KN-95 masks our daughters have sent us.
We’re both in the same ballgame staring into the sun, remembering Roger Maris and Judge Tammany, and a wedding night on a bus back to New York.
But this is a happy column, one of another year full of happy columns. I look forward to the opening of Waterville’s bright new city two years from now.
We arrived here all those anniversaries ago, and only regret it every January, the rattlesnake of Maine winters.
But October? You can’t kick October away.
Songwriter Johnny Mercer put it right:
And when October goes
the same old dream appears
And you are in my arms
To share the happy years.
The handsome couple on the escalator are showing signs of wear, and about to celebrate that other cold October day when they stood before Judge Tammany and thought, “Make it snappy, your honor. We have a bus to catch.”
BREAKING NEWS: Sixty-three years ago, on an October day in New York, an actor met a nightclub dancer/actress, and fell in love. We’re still falling, don’t catch us; we want to break a record.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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