That's Margie and me exactly fifty years ago today. If on our wedding day you had asked me what I might be doing in fifty years to celebrate our fiftieth anniversary, I never would have imagined that we'd be quarantined in our house, in the midst of a worldwide pandemic.

Even in our more recent planning for this day, it's not what we had in mind, which was more like a getaway with our kids, and our kids' kids. But we now visit them from six feet away, wearing masks, and I've only held my most recent grandchild once.

We've got to remind ourselves that compared to most under the current circumstances, we've got it good. Since we're retired, we have no jobs or income to lose. We have a house and land in a pleasant suburb that makes isolation easy.

We have enough resources to pay other people to shop for us, and thereby take risks on our behalf (they are generally younger, and in a lower-risk cohort should they have the misfortune of contracting the disease). We "shop" on InstaCart, sitting in front of a computer.

Still, it seems depressing. What we're losing is time, and in our late seventies, we don't have all that much time left to lose.

Our major recreations have long been travel and dining out, and both of those activities now seem too risky to undertake. Even if we were willing to get on a plane, we're not welcome in Europe, coming from the US where COVID-19 is still out of control. That's one of the many disadvantages of living in a country whose President is completely incompetent.

As for dining out, now a taboo activity, that's something we have always done to celebrate every special occasion. Here we were at our forty-fourth anniversary dinner at the Harvest restaurant in Cambridge in 2014, a much better year than 2020:

   

You'll notice everyone was packed in at the Harvest's outdoor terrace, and nobody is wearing a mask. Ah, the good old days!

The year before that, lucky 2013, we dined at one of our favorite restaurants, Il Capriccio. Their "Warm Chocolate Budino" is shown to the right. Not only that, our meal turned out to be free! The story of how that came to be can be found in my blog entry Forty-three years. But partly due to the pandemic, Il Capriccio has now closed for good. When we celebrated our birthdays with a dinner there in February, we didn't know it would be our last.

Actually, I hope that one benefit of this pandemic is that it exposed how stupid and delusional President Trump is, perhaps to the point where a majority of the country will actually be able to see it. It's awful that so many people had to die to pound this point home. Perhaps the most frightening thing about the election of Trump is that if he had been even slightly intelligent, and even slightly able to control his lies, tweets, and malignant narcissism, he could have easily locked in a second term. Of course, he could still do so anyway. But assuming Trump loses, there's a future Presidential candidate out there watching and learning, someone who's not the buffoon Trump is. That candidate may come at us wrapped in God and the flag, and end up dictator for life. ^Note 1

By the way, I had trouble naming this entry. Back when I was posting weekly to this blog, I posted an entry on each of my anniversaries for four years in a row, from 2012 through 2015. They were called Forty-two years, Forty-three years, Forty-four years, and Forty-five years. But just a little before our forty-third anniversary, I wrote an entry about my fiftieth college reunion, and without thinking, I called it Fifty years, thereby using up that title! ^Note 2

If only I had thought about my fiftieth wedding anniversary, at that point when it was still seven years in the future, when I named my fiftieth college reunion blog entry. It was the same mistake Margie had made when she first registered for the Fodor's Travel Forum. Since I had just retired, she chose for us a screen name of "justretired", and we've been stuck with it ever since, even though at this point in time, I've been retired for 17 years, so I'm hardly "just retired".

But I should take some solace in the fact that while the condition of the world at my fiftieth wedding anniversary is terrible, the condition of my marriage is great. And in the end, that's important. There are many people who are in quarantine alone, but Margie and I are not. In our late seventies, as we start to face the inevitable problems of aging (not for the faint of heart), we each have a partner we can depend on, and depend on with confidence. For better or for worse.

Being quarantined together at home beats traveling the world alone, so on the balance, we're doing OK. Margie, there's nobody else I'd rather be quarantined with.

Note 1:   "When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." (Sinclair Lewis)

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. . . . On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." (H. L. Mencken in the Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1920)   [return to text]

Note 2:   MIT graduations are always on a Friday. But during my fiftieth MIT reunion, I noticed that the commencement ceremony we attended was also on the same DATE as my commencement in 1963, Friday, June 7. That is, an integral number of weeks (18,263 days = 2,609 weeks, to be exact) had elapsed in the fifty years between those two events.

Similarly, I noticed that our fiftieth wedding anniversary fell on a Sunday, and I recalled that we had been married on a Sunday. Both were on Sunday, June 28, but separated by 50 years.

And the calendar math is exactly the same: Every common year is an even 52 weeks plus one "extra" day, so fifty years gives us 50 "extra" days (extra in the sense of not being part of one of the 52 whole weeks). Those fifty years also had 13 leap days. There were 13, not 12, because 2020 was a leap year.

So 50 extra days plus 13 leap days gives 63, and 63 is evenly divisible by seven. Thus there were an integral number of weeks between our wedding and our fiftieth anniversary, 2,609 weeks. Just as there had been exactly 2,609 weeks between my commencement ceremony in 1963 and the commencement ceremony in which I marched during my fiftieth MIT reunion.

Note that this only worked out (in both cases) because of where both of these these events occurred with respect to the four-year leap-year cycle. Had we been married on a Sunday a year earlier, Sunday, June 29, 1969, then our fiftieth anniversary on June 29, 2019 would have fallen on a Saturday, not a Sunday. And there would have only been 18,262 days between those two dates, one day short of 2,609 full weeks. A fifty-year interval isn't always the same number of days.

You see? I can't put up a blog entry without some sort of math in it. At least this time I put it in a footnote.   [return to text]