ONCE UPON A TIME

My father was born in 1899 and my mother in 1905, and these two photos which I first saw only recently capture them around the time they married in 1925. In the top photo my mother is the one with her hand to her face (or hair, not sure) with my father leaning over her, and in the bottom one they are the couple up front with my father's arms around my mother.

I adored my mother and still do. I lost her when I was twenty-three. I think of her every day. I adored my father too when I was a boy, but by the time I hit my teens we spent too much time arguing loudly and angrily over my actions and choices (especially my focusing on my poetry and writing and music and acting etc.) until I left home. Fortunately before he died in his seventies, I had found a way to forgive him, and myself, and was able to have civil and even loving visits to him as long as I kept the conversation focused on his past and not my present.