Nineteen Years is a Long Time . . . Especially on VHS

Monday marked my 19th wedding anniversary with The Spouse. And, given that we had finally gotten our power restored and that our town’s trick-or-treating adventure had been postponed until this weekend, I thought it would be fun to entertain the kids with our wedding videos (on VHS tapes), complete with early 90s hairstyles, attire and some family members looking a heck of a lot more spry than they do now.

Some of the Picket Fence Post kids’ observations, in no particular order:

• They thought that The Spouse looked very, very young. (He didn’t have a goatee back then and did have quite the baby face.) However they said they thought I looked the same, though The Spouse thought I looked angry. The Girl thought the bangs looked good on me.
• They couldn’t get over watching Grandma (my mother) dance. Nor could they believe that The Spouse’s father was out there grooving on the dance floor too.
• As they watched the tape and heard some of the tunes the DJ played – “Love Shack” by the B52s in particular – they said, “Wait, that song is that old?”
• There were two very young children at the wedding, children of my mother’s cousin who had traveled from far away to attend the blessed event. The Picket Fence Post kids have met them, but when they were college students, no longer the little toddlers coloring and dancing around. This was an eye-opener for them.
• They thought many people were wearing glasses that they considered “gigantic.”
• They, like the wedding guests at the time, were highly amused by a stunt The Spouse pulled: Since the reception was on Halloween night, he and the groomsmen snuck away and transformed into vampires, way before Stephenie Meyer even had an inkling about Twilight. The guys applied white powder to their faces and adorned plastic vampire teeth, with The Spouse throwing in an extra flourish with a black cape. The DJ requested that the dance floor be cleared as the sounds of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” filled the room and the “vampires” appeared, summoning the significant others to join them. I was stunned, having had no advanced knowledge of this plan, and, on the video, looked quite surprised when The Spouse tried to go all Edward Cullen on my neck. (This may be where the “you looked angry” comment came from.)
• Sadly, this was the first time they could remember seeing my grandfathers walk and talk as they’d both passed away before the kids were born.

That night, when The Spouse and I went to bed, we discovered that the Picket Fence Post kids had created a paper chain of multi-colored hearts saying, “Happy Anniversary.” There were 19 hearts, one for each year of marriage. It was a sweet way to cap off a weird, Snowtober, no power/no heat day.