Fifty-eight years ago this morning, two nineteen-year-old kids walked down the steps of the Rathaus in Wiesbaden, Germany, newly married and wondering what would come next.
Donna and I met as freshmen at American River College in Sacramento, California. She answered the card I’d pinned to the student center bulletin board, looking for someone to carpool with and share gas expenses. On our first date, a month later, we and another couple were busted for drinking beer in a lovers’ lane near Roseville, taken to the Placer County sheriff’s office in Auburn, booked, and eventually released. That was the night my mother met my future wife, and they hit it off immediately. We still smile at the memory.
Shortly after, my father was assigned to U.S. Air Forces Europe headquarters in Wiesbaden, Germany. Still only eighteen and with less than a year of college under my belt, I went overseas with my family. Not long after, Donna called to say she was pregnant. We flew Donna to Germany, where we married in a civil ceremony attended by my family and friends of my parents.
Once married, Donna and I rented a tiny apartment off-base. I got a job at the base exchange and took college courses at night. Some time after our son Gregory was born in March, 1965, Donna went to work for the BX as well. By the summer of 1967 we’d saved enough for airfare back to the States, with enough left over to buy a second-hand car in Detroit … where, for the first time, our son and I met Donna’s family … and make our way back to Sacramento to start life on our own.
And here we are … still married, still in love, still wondering what will come next.