Lynchburg Living

"Just a Thought..."

By Jon Dupin

There is an ancient practice that can reignite the blaze of a tested marriage. I got your attention with the Ninja talk, didn’t I? Anyway, it has to do with origins of a love story, the very first sparks, when two people realized they were the ones for each other.

I’m like a lot of men and instincts that used to win me points with my wife seem to lounge around in my imagination and wait for me to boot them off the couch with a little effort and care. Once this instinct is awake again, though, I know it means that she and I can fall crazier in love. Call me the carnival freak, but falling crazier in love, a few years into matrimony, sounds like fun to me.

Recently, my wife, Tammy, turned 32 years old, I surprised her with a nostalgic thrill ride. Here’s how it worked. I kissed her awake, and then whispered an Irish Pub version of “Happy Birthday To You” in her ear. Normally, she would have squinted one eye opened, smirked and rolled back to sleep, but not this time. Two sublime occasions were colliding: Her birthday, and celebrating it while away on vacation. Perfect.

“You have 20-minutes to get ready,” I demanded playfully.

“What?” she asked. “Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise,” I said. “All I can tell you is it will be kid-free and you’ll need to bring the camera.”

The utterance of “surprise” and “kid-free” catapulted her from the bed and she was completely ready with 30-seconds to spare. Before long, we were heading south down Highway-17 from Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina, to the South Carolina beach line.

A little back-story might help here: There is a fishing pier on the South Carolina coast that is a time machine for me. Because, when I step onto its salt-bleached planks and hear the loops of the surf and seagulls playing, I am 17 again. The pier was once the backdrop where I lived out my late teenage summers and fell desperately in love with a girl. Yes, it always goes back to a girl. To me, it became my armada to sail into an idealized future, to make my way in the world. Part of me, I guess, is still that kid, but I am fortunate that most of him has evaporated and transformed into a different me. Another part of him I don’t ever want to relinquish, though.

Today, that girl from the pier is my wife. And, without a doubt, Tammy has crafted, from heart and hands, a marriage I couldn’t have scripted in a trillion decades. But, those early days on the boards and benches of the pier, when love was skin deep and thriving solely on wonder and naivete, I still somehow knew she’d be a magnificent woman. Even then, the pier was a time machine, giving flashes of who this girl might be in her 30s and beyond. And, beneath my heart’s immaturity, I wanted in on her story for life.

Up until that day, southbound towards the shore on Tammy’s birthday, neither of us had seen that pier in years. However, something mystical seemed to call us back there, perhaps to rediscover a useful relic from our origins and get us moving toward what should never get lost–that thing called wonder.

Soon, we crossed over the tidal bridge towards the main intersection of Garden City, South Carolina, a sliver of sand and low-rent vacation towers. We were there. By then, Tammy signaled she was in on the surprise. She, too, must have known the pier was calling us back.

“I love this,” she said.

Then she played back a rush of episodes from when our two families vacationed there: The arcade, Sam’s Corner hot dogs and the photo booth. These were monuments in our tale, like a back lot of enchanted movie sets and costumes. She didn’t say it with words, but I was sure the same was happening to us both … a rekindling. No, neither of us would have described our marriage, at that second or season, as a bad marriage, not even an average one; and yet, I think we both wanted to dive back into the fire and wonder again.

The panorama from the pier’s end was second nature; the horizon sprawled into forever and sat before us as a banquet cake. In a way, it was like we’d never stop returning there. Yet, Tammy’s hair and skin were different now. The ocean blaze showed them more vivid and seasoned than years before. Now, she was a woman and a mother, a wife and my greatest friend. Beautiful.

She rested her elbows on the railing where thousands of names were tattooed into the wood all down the structure. Everything about her seemed fictitious to me right then. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her.

“You’re incredible,” I said.

She blushed and tried to deflect my attention. She pointed out two names inside a heart shape from 1993, the first year we stood there together. We laughed and dared the other to do the carving we hadn’t done back then–Jon and Tammy Forever. In a way, we had unexpectedly become those kids again, only now more comfortable in our skin and closer to what makes life truly sing. I kissed her.

Our morning there on the pier and sidewalks was a slow pace through all the familiar settings from our starting point. Before we left, we added to our collection of photo booth shots from the arcade. So, we drove away with another vintage strip of black-and-white pictures in the dashboard. But, more than anything, we left there with an unsaid promise: Never let those kids from the pier fade away.

No one would call me a marriage expert, but I believe great relationship practices are sometimes the simplest ones. Think about it–something intangible drew us to our spouses from the very beginning; the fire and wonder we couldn’t shake. Some say, however, that all that gets snuffed out in time–paying bills, raising kids and old age. I say no. We just have to get off the couch and go search for it again. For me, at that moment, it was a weathered fishing pier. Tomorrow, it will be something different. Where is it for you?