08/23/2026
The Picture
This past weekend, twenty-four of us gathered in Hilton Head to celebrate two milestones.
Dad turned eighty.
Mom and Dad celebrated fifty-five years of marriage.
Those numbers sound impressive when you say them out loud, but I’ve been thinking about how numbers never really tell the story. Eighty years. Fifty-five years. They’re only the cover of the book. The life itself is found in everything that happened in between.
Mom and Dad met in the library at Concord College in Athens, West Virginia. Mom was a math major studying calculus. Dad, who had recently returned from Vietnam, walked over and asked if she needed any help.
I’ve often wondered what his plan would have been if she had actually said yes.
Her calculus exceeded anything a business major had ever prepared him for.
Somehow, that conversation turned into another one, and six months later they were married.
Looking back, getting married on Dad’s birthday was a fairly strategic decision. As far as I can remember, he has never forgotten their anniversary.
Their introductions to each other’s families were memorable in very different ways.
Dad’s first trip to Possum Creek wasn’t spent sitting politely on the porch making small talk with Grandpa. Instead, the two of them spent the day blasting stumps with dynamite so Grandpa could build an airplane runway across the farm.
That was Dad’s introduction to Mom’s family.
Mom’s introduction to Dad’s family was a little different. Dad was one of eleven children, so there was no quiet, private meeting with the family. She walked into a house full of noise, opinions, and enough activity to make anyone wonder what she had gotten herself into. Somewhere in the middle of it all, Grandpa pinched her arm and announced her dress size. It was apparently his way of welcoming her—or at least of making sure she understood that joining this family came with very little privacy.
Like so many young couples, they began building a life wherever opportunity led them. They lived in Charlotte for a while, then Atlanta, before eventually returning to Bluefield and settling into the house that has been home ever since.
Dad spent his career traveling the back roads of Appalachia, selling mining equipment to coal companies scattered throughout the mountains. Every now and then, especially during the summer when school was out, I got to ride along with him. I don’t remember many of the sales calls, but I remember the feeling of those days. I remember watching the mountains roll by through the truck window, stopping somewhere for lunch, and feeling incredibly important simply because I was going with Dad.
Mom’s work happened much closer to home.
She raised four children.
At first glance, that sounds like a single sentence. But anyone who has ever raised a family knows it contains thousands of days no one else ever sees. It was school lunches and laundry, doctor’s appointments and homework, church on Sundays, ballgames, holidays, meals around the table, and all the quiet work that holds a family together without asking for recognition.
At first, she supplemented Dad’s income by substitute teaching. Later, she ran a bakery out of our home.
Their life wasn’t without its challenges. There were seasons of uncertainty, health struggles, disappointments, and prayers that took longer to answer than anyone would have preferred. There were also countless ordinary days that never seemed particularly remarkable while they were being lived.
Dad had one habit that still makes us laugh.
For reasons none of us has ever understood, he was convinced he would never live past fifty-five.
Why fifty-five?
No one knows.
He simply believed it.
Every birthday after that became another opportunity to remind him that he had been wonderfully wrong.
Maybe that’s one of the gifts that comes with growing older. You eventually realize how many fears never came to pass—and how many blessings you never could have imagined.
As I watched everyone gathering for the family picture this weekend, I realized we weren’t just trying to get twenty-four people to look at the same camera and smile.
We were looking at what fifty-five years had become.
Children.
Grandchildren.
Stories told every Thanksgiving.
Inside jokes that don’t need explaining.
A family tree with branches spreading farther than two college students in a library could ever have imagined.
Mom wanted one good picture.
Just one in which most of us were looking at the camera and the majority weren’t making some sort of face.
It sounded simple enough.
I’m not entirely convinced we accomplished it.
But years from now, I don’t think any of us will remember whether every smile was perfect.
We’ll remember that we were there.
We’ll remember gathering because two ordinary people quietly built a life worth coming home to.
The older I get, the more I think that’s how the best lives are lived.
Not in headlines.
Not in grand accomplishments.
But in ordinary faithfulness, repeated so many times that one day you look around a room and realize twenty-four people are together because two young people met in a college library, said yes to one another, and kept saying yes through all the years that followed.
