64 Years of Candlelight

I grew up in the sticks. Well, more precisely, I grew up in the woods—the woods of northern Wisconsin near the upper peninsula of Michigan and Lake Superior. We were by definition poor—“lacking sufficient money to live at a standard considered comfortable or normal in society.” My parents never owned a home. Getting a new pair of jeans was a big deal. That being said, we did not go hungry and although we ate our fair share of fish, wild game, and foraged greens, Mom would also make egg foo yung and boiled shrimp on special occasions. She was adventurous and inventive in the kitchen. The sad thing is, we rarely ate together as a family. Mom would feed us kids early and then, when Dad came home from work after seven o’clock, she would sit down and eat with him. To be fair, this may have been due to the fact that our cabin was so tiny that only four at a time could fit at the kitchen table, and we were a family of seven.

It wasn’t until I spent time with my husband’s godparents, June and Dwight, that I began to ache for what we were missing when I was a kid.

Recently, June and Dwight celebrated 64 years of marriage, and I was fortunate enough to be their houseguest. We sat down to many lovely meals during my visit, and I discovered that they have had a candlelight dinner every single night of their marriage—not just on special occasions, but on school nights, with their kids, after they both worked long hours at demanding careers, or after they folded the laundry and paid their bills. On some occasions their children invited friends for dinner and begged that it would be sans candlelight, like the other families dined. But June and Dwight stuck to their guns. Sixty-four years of candlelight. That’s special.

Dinnertime at their home is accompanied with classical music, real cloth tablecloth and napkins, water glasses tinkling with ice, and more than a sprinkling of excellent conversation. The talk is sometimes about current events, sometimes about family trials and tribulations, about daily living, and very often about memories. I don’t know about you, but I love to hear about the lives of the generations before us. June and Dwight raised their family at a time when California was booming and they both worked in the exciting field of aerospace. They were part of a pioneering profession—the Mad Men (and women) of space. They lived it up in the decades of cocktail parties and running clubs, of sexy convertibles, bellbottoms, mutton chop sideburns, and puffy hairdos. A time when duck a l’orange and Trader Vic’s were hip. They…well… they lived and they shared all of that together for 64 years. And yes, it wasn’t always easy and it wasn’t always merry, but it was real life and they stuck it out together.

Dinner conversation with June and Dwight reminds me that every single day we take another breath is precious, and therefore, per their example, every single day of our lives deserves dinner by candlelight.