My parents were married in June 1962.
When I was growing up, I always enjoyed looking through their wedding album. I don't remember how many pictures were in it or even what the album itself looked like. What I remember is the people.
There were my mother and father, young and just starting out. Around them were relatives I knew years later as middle-aged or old people. In those pictures, they were young too.
That was probably part of what interested me. Kids tend to think of their parents as always having been their parents. An old photograph proves otherwise. Here were Mom and Dad before the house, the kids, the jobs, the bills and everything else that eventually became their life together.
My Aunt Betty attended the wedding. Years later, she told me something about those days that I still remember.
When a woman went shopping for a nice outfit, particularly for something like a wedding, she didn't just buy a dress. It was customary to put together the whole outfit: hat, gloves, shoes and purse.
That was simply how people dressed.
By the time I was old enough to notice such things, most of that had disappeared. Men still owned suits, of course, and people dressed up for church, weddings and funerals, but the rules were loosening. Women weren't expected to have a hat and gloves to go downtown. A purse didn't have to be bought as part of an outfit.
Aunt Betty wasn't trying to give me a lesson in fashion. She was just telling me how things were.
That's the kind of detail that makes old family photographs interesting. The people in them weren't trying to document history. Nobody thought a hat, a pair of gloves, a narrow tie, a hairstyle or a car parked outside was worth explaining. Those things were ordinary.
Then enough years pass, and the ordinary things become the interesting things.
I wish I still had that wedding album.
If I had it today, I'd probably study it much more carefully than I did when I was young. I'd want to know who every person was. I'd look at the cars in the background and the buildings. I'd wonder where the reception was held and what was served. I'd probably notice relatives I had forgotten were there.
Most of all, I'd look at my parents.
In June 1962, almost everything that I think of as our family history was still ahead of them. They couldn't know what their marriage would bring or what their family would eventually look like. They were simply two young people getting married.
When I looked through the album as a kid, I couldn't have understood that. They were Mom and Dad, only younger.
Now I understand it differently.
One of the strange things about getting older is realizing that the adults you grew up around once stood at the same starting lines you did. They had plans, worries, expectations and probably a fair amount of uncertainty. They were figuring things out as they went along.
The wedding album captured one of those starting lines.
Unfortunately, the album is gone now, or at least gone from my life. I don't have the photographs to scan or pass along. I can't zoom in on the faces and ask someone who they were. Like a lot of family history, I didn't realize how much I would value it until it was no longer available.
But some of it survived anyway.
I remember going through the album.
I remember seeing my parents young.
I remember Aunt Betty was at the wedding.
And I remember her telling me that in 1962, if a woman was going shopping for a nice outfit, she might come home not just with the dress, but with the hat, gloves, shoes and purse to go with it.
At the time, it was just an interesting thing my aunt told me.
Today, it's one of the few pieces of the album I still have.
Not the photograph itself, but the memory that went with it.
Sometimes that's what family history comes down to. The pictures disappear. The people who could explain them disappear too. What remains are the stories and details somebody happened to remember and bothered to pass along.
The album is gone.
But I still remember turning the pages.