Indulge me, and let the “sandwich” generation express her take on the occasion of her parents’ 50th anniversary…. Sallie

Fifty years ago, Dwight D. Eisenhower sat in the Oval Office, baseball’s New York Yankees were getting ready to win their eighth World Series in 10 years, very few had to learn about World War II in history books and Sputnik had not yet spread its challenge across the night sky. That year, David Branson Satterthwaite and Sallie Anne Dimmick stood on a cold March afternoon before a small congregation in Pennsylvania and said, “I do.”

While I hold a typical Presbyterian’s belief in God’s sovereignty, I still play a mental game of “what if” regarding the events that led to that moment in history. What if my parents had chosen different colleges? What if my mother had held a different college job and had not met my father as she checked him in at the college chapel door? What if she had never fallen for that skinny man with the deep blue eyes? Then my parents would never have known 50 years of living and loving. My two sisters and I would not have been born, and my two little sons would never have come into the world.

Through time, so many parts had to be assembled. How easily could my four grandparents have married other people? How many other countless connections had to be made across the millennia? A single different choice, a single train missed and an irreplaceable piece would be missing and my parents never would have been born.

Those of you who know my parents, know how they squabble and sometimes seem more embattled then in love. But they know what it means to be committed. They know when it’s important to set aside  differences. They know how to make the thousand and one compromises needed to make 50 years of life together work.

What a heritage I can pass along to my three oldest children who were born to my husband’s late wife. They have three sets of grandparents who have all made it past 50 years! They have close to 170 years of good example set before them.
Now turn with me from family connections to the people who are not blood kin, but who have played a substantial role in the success of my parents’ marriage. What if people had not come into my Mom and Dad’s lives along the way to encourage them, and. to give them a wholeness in life that comes from a group of loving friends?

The number of connections needed to create my parents is vast, but I cannot count the connections needed to bring all their friends into the world. And those friends had to make the choices to move to this area and to get involved in places where they would meet my Mom or Dad. What if one of these friends hadn’t been born? What if he or she chose a different church, a different avocation, a different neighborhood? My folks’ lives would be so much poorer for never having met them.

So many of these people either sent cards or came together on a bright, sunny day last weekend in an upstairs room at Christ Our Shepherd Lutheran Church. Fully 35 years of my parents’ marriage has been spent in Peachtree City. That many years means that my parents have developed endless friendships with coworkers, neighbors, fellow fire department personnel and others with common interests.

Last weekend these friends gathered in love and support to celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Among them are about a dozen who used their creative genius and a fair measure of elbow grease to create the party. To them, and to those friends new and old, I say a heartfelt thank you.

Fifty years have passed. The White House now houses the son of a former president. The Yankees continue to challenge for the World Series, space travel has become so common that the launches are rarely televised and I had to teach my children about World War II like any other long-ago conflict. My parents still share their own kind of love and the affection of a whole community.

What if …?

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