Vivian DeGain Better at 50 Blog
Columnist and arts writerAnniversary, an Associated Press Award-winning column
Married on a day no longer ours alone
By Vivian DeGain
Daily Tribune Column Sept. 12, 2004
September 11 was, before the horrible tragedy in 2001, perhaps the happiest day of my life, my life so far this midlife.
Doug DeGain and I were married Sept. 11, 1982 on a hot, glorious, steamy Saturday in the chapel of the St. Joseph’s Hospital in Mt. Clemens. We had a reception in my mother’s back yard surrounded by her rose garden, under a tented canopy with a classical-guitar and flute duet.
We were both 30, handsome, hard-working and had an instant family, with a four-year-boy in tow who walked down the aisle with us. The boy shadowed the man like he had never had a father before. He needed a dad; he finally got a darn good one. The first time Doug visited my home on the east side of Detroit, the boy handed him a six-shooter and said, “Do you like to play cowboys and Indians, Doug? C’mon let’s go up in the attic and shoot ghosts.”
Our family grew annually, with the birth of son number two, number three a daughter, the two of us going in turn to night school for better degrees. He opened a business. I landed jobs and we both clocked-in plenty of volunteer hours for, let’s see, three elementary schools, two middle schools, two high schools, countless teams. We still pay college tuition for two. That ghost shooter is 27 today, earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering and started paying his own bills in September 1999.
We’ve marked our anniversaries with the start of another school year, school football season for one, hockey season for another and theater season for the third.
Each Sept. 11, we’ve had fabulous dinners out and delicious nights in, but finally, when our kids grew old enough to be left alone for the night, Doug and I found another unique passion, perfectly timed for mid-September winds.
We celebrate the glorious color and perfect weather of our anniversary by driving to Pointe Pelee Canada and watching the annual raptor migration as sometimes thousands of hawks, falcons and other birds soar in the heat thermals over the land mass as it diminishes over Lake Erie. Migrating raptors find their way here, from the northern wilds of Canada to the warm winter lands in Mexico.
Think that’s a lot of flying for a little Sharp-Shinned Hawk or even a Broad-winged Hawk, bigger than a crow? Well, monarch butterflies and humming birds do exactly the same thing. All cross over Point Pelee these weeks.
So, for the last few years, Doug and I have headed for the Holiday Beach Fall Hawk Festival in Canada and become awed by the skies. Nice of the national park staff over there to stage such a show for us, isn’t it?
These are the things I remember about Sept. 11, 2001.
We woke early, excited to spend a day in the woods while the kids were in school.
We both had early business appointments that Tuesday, but planned to each be free before noon, fly home to change into our grubbies, grab our birth certificates and get to the Windsor Tunnel.
Pointe Pelee and Holiday Beach are only about an hour away. It’s very magical there, known as a year-long haven for birds of all kinds, especially for song birds like Wilson’s Warblers in the spring and shore birds like the elegant Blue Heron, White Egret and peculiar green Night Heron all year long.
We had worked out a plan to spend the day with our binoculars, breathing fresh sage in the woods, and climbing the three-story high wooden tower that makes Holiday Beach hawk watching so spectacular. Yes, we’d arrive a bit late for the early morning flights overhead, but there would still be plenty to see for late afternoon and evening. Then, a trip to a local market up the street who sells ice cream by the scoop. No fancy dinner this year, mud was the order of the day. One of these days, we said, we will take the camper and stay all night and watch the bats.
I was driving to my 9 a.m. meeting when I heard the NPR radio announcer in my car — a second jet had hit Twin Towers.
A second jet crashed into the same place — that was no freaking coincidence, couldn’t have been. We all felt that same sickening eureka moment at the same time.
When I arrived at my meeting, I found a pay phone, called my husband and asked if he had CNN on? I told him to turn it on right away.
Like everyone, we suddenly had no where to go that day.
Our younger kids, both in high school, came home on time but in a daze. We all sat in the front room hearing and half-watching the events of the day, as if the reruns would change our disbelief into something else.
It didn’t.
One year later, when Doug and I wanted to spend our 20th anniversary without those same reruns, we invited four best friends over for a home-cooked dinner and plenty of good red wine. They came. We never turned on the TV but listened instead to Bob Marley, Van Morrison, Pat Metheny and Miles.
At this moment, I have to ask myself if we’ve yet gone back to Ontario for the date since then. It’s still a blur. Not a good day to cross the border for a few years anyway.
This year, we’ll go back. Perhaps to the sweet little bed-and-breakfast we have found online. Perhaps to the sooty-black swamp, the sandy beach, the lake, the sage-brushed woods or the tower.
Maybe it’ll be a wonderful evening out to dinner or a day of mud and mosquito repellant.
It’s still our day. It always will be our day.
But yes, now it’s also their day. And their families’ day. And the world’s day.
But it was ours first.
We mark 22 years, having feathered our nest with our own breast-feathers, having sent our baby chick off to college this fall, and having years ahead of heat thermals to glide through.
