The night my parents met him was the day he asked me to marry him. I had telephoned them to say that we were coming over right away; I had some exciting news! They had already gone to bed and didn’t bother changing out of their night clothes for our visit. Not that it matter; I lived just five minutes away. I rang the doorbell and we waited on the front porch. My mother opened the door wide. My eyes were wide, too, when I realized that the bright light from the living room lamp behind her cut right through the thin material of her nightgown, leaving nothing to the imagination. I could only imagine what he thought, seeing his future mother-in-law like that for the first time.
I was mortified and jumped in front of my mother to give her a big hug while edging her away from the light of the lamp. Herding everyone inside the living room, I introduced him to my half-asleep parents, first by name, followed by, “and we’re getting married!!!” We didn’t stay but a minute; in retrospect, I think my parents were in shock. But by that time, they had gotten used to my impulsiveness and usually didn’t question things I did anymore.
My mother’s side of the family is Polish, and since there were ten brothers and sisters, major occasions such as weddings and funerals garnered groups as large as five hundred relatives and friends. There would be enough food to feed an army and a full-bar at both weddings and funerals. The only difference between the two was that there was be dancing to a polka band at a wedding.
My future husband had only been to wedding receptions that fed cake to a few people who sat politely. There was no way he could imagine the hoopla that made the next five months fly by, and although our wedding was small by my family’s standards (only 250 people) it was a day neither of us will ever forget.
The cold and often snowy winter in 1978 gave rise to more and more discussions about living on a sailboat, something that he had been considering for several years. It was all very exciting and seemed very romantic to me: carefree and tropical, everything St. Louis was not, especially not in the winter. I, who had never been on a vacation, was easy to convince. So, all through the spring, we were making preparations to leave at the end of the school year. The house we lived in was put up for sale; both of our cars–including his 280Z–were traded in for a Volkswagon camper and we sold a lot of our stuff–including wedding gifts–which was the nest egg for our dream.
Our families were dumbfounded when they learned that we were going to quit our jobs. My mother, in particular, could not fathom that anyone in their right mind would want to leave St. Louis. But we had dreams, and by the summer of 1979 we were leisurely making our way to… Well, we didn’t know! That was the missing piece of our plan: we didn’t know where we would end up. But we had a camper, a pocketful of money, and were two adventurous souls. We had heard that jobs were plentiful in California, but the boats in Florida were lots cheaper. It wasn’t until the day we left that we flipped a coin to determine our direction: Florida.
That was our first lesson on appreciating “the journey.” We’ve been doing it ever since.