Before Dating Apps, There Was Mom! – Part 3

Well, it’s official. Today marks 50 years of marriage between my wife, Kathy, and me! 12,263 days, including 12 leap years, have passed since we exchanged wedding vows. The same day when Brian Patrick Murphy and Kathleen Rose McGee tied the knot and became one flesh in God’s eyes.

We’ve seen, heard, and experienced so much together over these 5 decades, internally and externally. And life wasn’t always enjoying a chilled, 6-ounce bottle of Little Toms with a tin of Charles Chips on a warm summer afternoon! (A shout-out to our northeastern and midwestern Boomers who still remember the 1960s.)

But I digress. Here is the conclusion to our first official date:

It was June 1^st, 1975, a typical dry, cool Sunday evening, just after Memorial Day. We were both 19, although on August 23rd, I’d turn 20. The streets of Cleveland were mostly empty. After parking my candy-red Ford Maverick, we walked to the Palace Theater to see a Bee Gees concert.

For the record, these were the pre-Disco Bee Gees, so we came to hear their melodies from the 60s and early 70s, such as “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart”, “To Love Somebody,” and “Words”. It was great until they introduced us to some of their soon-to-be-released, new Disco craziness. The crowd erupted in displeasure and shouted, “Play the old stuff!” But I wasn’t so unhappy; I was sitting side-by-side with the most beautiful woman in the whole wide world!

It was a good concert. Afterward, we drove back to our neck of the woods to a diner called Manners Big Boy in Pepper Pike, OH, a place my friends and I regularly hung out at. Those were the days when you could play music from a tabletop jukebox for a dime a record or three plays for a quarter. I ordered my standard double-deck Big Boy burger with a side order of onion rings, which I’d later regret! I don’t remember what the mesmerizing girl I’d soon be ‘going steady’ with had ordered.

But what I remember most of all was enjoying every moment with her. This was a truly historic evening, yet I didn’t yet know how beautiful the rest of our story would be! I was just a kid having a brand-new kind of fun with someone from the opposite sex.

While driving her home, and to my shame, the onion rings (or nerves) got to me. I passed gas. And not just any kind of gas, but the kind that rivaled a lethal pest insecticide that could surely kill everything in the car. So, I tacitly cracked my window open a tiny bit to allow in relationship-saving fresh air. Oh, if only she could see in the glow of the dashboard just how red my face was! I thought she’d tell me to pull over, kick me out of my car, drive herself home, and leave me stranded on S.O.M. Center Road. Yet somehow she didn’t detect my flatulence, and we had a great wrap-up to our date on our journey to her house.

Look, I know I’m nobody without her. She’s my light, inspiration, backbone, and purpose for living. Without her, I question whether I’d still be alive. But we’re still here, alive and standing, and looking forward to another 50 years of bliss, or for however long God blesses us with life. It’s been a great ride, better than the best roller coaster Cedar Point ever had!

“Jesus replied, ‘Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator “made them male and female” and said: ‘That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two become one flesh’?” (Matthew 19:4-5 NCB)