Crandall, on 60 years of marriage: Marry well, young people

It all started in high school French class. You remember how it was. The teacher would give the class a quiz and then announce: “Okay, pass your papers to the [...]

It all started in high school French class. You remember how it was. The teacher would give the class a quiz and then announce: “Okay, pass your papers to the person in front of you, and we’ll mark them.”

As it was, she (you know who she is) sat at the very front with the smart kids, the ones who kind of wanted to pass the course, and I sat at the back with the ones who weren’t so smart and were there more to have a good time than to learn anything. So you can see how it went: if the papers were to be passed ahead, she had to bring hers back to me; if they had to be passed back, I had to take mine up to her.

So that’s where it started. But she was kind of shy; the conversations didn’t last very long in that fall of ’63. Then, the second connection was her best friend.

Again, the smart kids were taking Chemistry and Physics. Not me, I didn’t fit in there. So I took Commerce 24, whatever the 24 meant, and it put me in with the kids two years younger than me, including her friend, Coleen.

Coleen and I became acquainted, and before long I was driving her and her friend (the ‘she’ of this story) home from school every day, and anywhere else they wanted to go. I was driving, Coleen sitting next to me and she on the far side. But it didn’t last that way.

Coleen was kind of cute, but didn’t have much to say. ‘She’ was cute too, and once she got to know you, had trainloads to say. So before long, she was sitting beside me, and Coleen was on the other side.

I don’t know where Coleen is anymore; we think in Manitoba. But I know where she is. She’s still sitting beside me, and has been for sixty years.

Ever since that walk down the aisle. There have been lots of surprises along the way. One of the first was right in college.

During my fourth and last year, I could see that there were a couple of courses that I needed that I didn’t have time to take. We were financially struggling kids and had two part-time jobs to try to make ends meet. But I wanted to get the two courses done so I could graduate with my class.

So I enrolled in correspondence courses for the ones I needed. Then, she did the work of doing the courses; I read the papers over and wrote the exams, passed them both and graduated. After college, we decided to see how the rest of Canada lives and spent six years in Toronto, the city that much of the country loves to hate, but we loved every minute.

It was me, however, who had spent four years in college and who the story should be all about, not her. It was me who had the good job with IBM at Canada’s financial Wall Street, the corner of King and Bay Streets. But it isn’t that way.

It started with what I used to tease her about a little bit, what I called those ‘trashy’ home decorating shows on TV. Little did I know that when she and I started a decorating store here in Golden in ’76, it would be her that knew everything that customers were asking questions about. The ones like ‘what goes with this’ and ‘what goes with that?’

I knew nothing. Then when she and I started installing carpet because we couldn’t find an installer, it was her that knew how to make the carpet cuts, the ones that made the difference between installing it properly and not so well. Carpet, you understand, is really just heavy fabric, heavy cloth, and if you ever made kids clothes, as she did, you know how to cut it.

Does the angle on that sleeve go this way or that way? Does the angle around that door go this way or that way? She knew.

She had watched the shows. I had gone to college. And then when we started the Golden News in ’91, and bought our own press, we found that controlling the paper as it went through the press at sixty miles an hour required management of the tension on the paper.

Exactly similar to the way that you control the thread going through a sewing machine, as she had learned from her mother and from the textiles part of Home Economics classes in high school. I didn’t take Home Ec. I should have.

Instead, I took the real Economics where we studied price theory and elasticity of product demand, and never used any of it. Then, during our political years, it didn’t sound very good to have a candidate whose grammar was terrible. I learned from my parents, who had grown up on an Alberta farm where the cows and horses didn’t know the difference.

But she knew grammar and taught me what I needed to know. As it turned out, I didn’t need most of that college stuff. You see, I had married well.

Well enough that in addition to what she had learned on TV, she also picked up enough to do most of the essential work in raising five kids. Dads help, and I did what I could, but there is no replacement for a mother. No replacement when knees get scratched, sleep won’t come, or sisters are mean to each other.

That was the first three kids, and then we adopted twins. They were my great-nieces, not from her side of the family. But she made the decision on adoption.

It wouldn’t have been fair for me to make it, knowing that mothers do most of the work. We used to say that when one wasn’t crying, the other one was. And she was always there for all of those five kids.

And still is. So last Tuesday, when we hit sixty years, it was hard for me not to look back and appreciate each of those years. Years when I learned things about her that I hadn’t picked up in French class.

There were lots of surprises. Good ones! And I’m not sure they’re over yet.

But I am sure of one thing. It has been very good getting to know her! So if there is a lesson in this piece, it’s for the young people, and it’s this: marry well.

And I know what I’m talking about! I’ve been learning it, over and over, for sixty years.