41? ... 42? ... 44!

It’s safe to say that Ginny and I have been married for 40+ years. We honeymooned in the oldest continuously occupied city in the U.S., St. Augustine, Florida, about 35 miles south of Jacksonville. Although it will not be our anniversary for a couple of months yet, we spent last Sunday driving to St. Augustine to revisit some of the places we remember from our honeymoon.

Great fun!

We arrived in the Old City in time for breakfast at a restaurant overlooking Matanzas Bay. Here’s a photo of Ginny at our table; she looks so beautiful, fresh and happy:

After breakfast we sneaked out for a smoke into a walled private garden courtyard behind the place where Ginny posed by a misplaced lamppost where once a street may have crossed the property. While there, a young man came out for a smoke break and revealed that he’s been married for only a year. He’s already feeling some tensions of married life and was amazed that we remain romantically in love after 41 years. I told him one secret is to simply learn to tolerate each other when that’s the best you can do.

Gin and I along with scores of other tourists strolled the length of St George Street and paused to rest at the old slave market. There some lady snapped a photo of us together as we discussed the question of exactly how long we’ve been married.

We strolled browsing amid shops and paused for ice cream and coffee near the old city gates and I took this photo of her with the old fort in the background:

We toured the Lightener Museum, an exquisite collection of Victorian stuff and other stuff that took the fancy of Otto C. Lightner, a wealthy collector who housed his collections in the lavish mansion of the old Alcazar Hotel.

We saw a number of exquisite inlaid—well, I call them writing desks, but there’s a fancy term for them—that had belonged to Napoleon. One of these desks has over 200 secret compartments and pigeon holes.

And we saw a gold gilt, two-person, swan rocking chair, the kind that temps you to cuddle:

I enjoyed seeing the stuffed lion, the shrunken head, the Egyptian mummy and the bronze or marble statues of naked women.

Ginny enjoyed browsing through collections of old buttons (like from dresses and shirts), crystal bowls. She enjoyed the polished ballroom and the spiral staircases of the old hotel. And she admired a tiffany lamp with a glass shade formed in a dragon fly pattern:

One room intrigued us both. Mr. Lightner collected stained glass windows. Many of these were created by Louis Comfort Tiffany; they are displayed back-lighted in a dark room. Ginny posed beside windows portraying two other beauties:

She photographed me beside this Tiffany window showing St. Augustine, the man, not the city, the names are pronounced differently although I think the city was named for the man—who is shown reading. I’m sure it must be one of my books he’s reading:

Downstairs, a museum staff member played some of the antique music machine which long predate the phonograph. One of the tunes one machine played was “When You And I Were Young, Maggie”.

In the museum gift shop I asked the museum lady what Otto Lightner did for a living that he could afford to buy such a collection of treasures. She said he was a publisher!

That broke me up. I’m a publisher and it was all I could do to afford to buy our admission tickets to the museum!

I suppose there are publishers, and then again there are Publishers.

However, be that as it may, I splurged and bought Ginny an umbrella which replicates Tiffany’s Dragonfly lampshade:

Hot, tired and hungry by now, we walked to the bay front where US Highway A1A crosses the Bridge Of Lions. We stopped for lunch at the A1A Aleworks and Cuban Restaurant; The last time we were in this restaurant, it had been a French bakery.

When we mentioned that to the young lady who served us, a girl I imagine to be in her mid-20s, she was amazed that we’ve been married so long. She misheard us and thought we said we’ve been married for 44 years. To celebrate, our of her own pocket, she bought me a beer called Red Brick Ale. The place brews their own beer and I told her this Red Brick Ale was the best I’ve ever tasted.

So she brought me several small glasses of other beers to sample. Now the last beer I tasted was during half-time of the 2007 Super Bowl so I accused her of trying to get me snockered. The samples included the girl’s own favorite, Porpoise Point, some Honey Mead, and a beer brewed from bananas—ghastly stuff! But the Red Brick Ale tasted heavenly.

And our food also tasted heavenly. I had coconut shrimp with a black bean and rice dish cooked with a touch of jalapeno pepper. One of the best meals I’ve ever eaten anywhere.

And the girl kept marveling that we’ve been in love for 44 years.

After lunch, we crossed the street into the Slave Market park. There Ginny snapped this photo of the building which now houses the Wachovia Bank.

That’s cool because many years ago in a dump I found a piggy-bank shaped like this building, but then the name was the Exchange Bank Of St. Augustine, an institution which lasted till the mid 1950s. I gave that white-metal coin bank to Ginny as a reminder of our honeymoon.

Ginny’s coin bank looks like this:

The shape of that tower reminds us of something related to our honeymoon.

Ah yes I remember now, from our motel room window 40+ years ago, we could see that tower silhouetted against the skyline across the bay; for some reason they were setting off fireworks from the top of the building. St. Augustine is always celebrating some event or another with fireworks.

Here’s that photo a passerby took of Ginny and me sitting in the Slave Market park.

As we sat in the park watching people walk past and remembering the days of our honeymoon, we chuckled over the girl in the restaurant thinking we’ve been married 44 years—we’re not that old!

As we talked there was some disagreement on the matter. I said we’ve been married 41 years; Ginny says we’ve been married 42 years.

I said it’s only been 41 years—but it they’ve been so hard on her that it seems like 42 years.

She said it’s been 42 years—but that I earned a year off for good behavior.