WHY EVERY JULY 9TH SINCE, TRANSPORTS ME BACK TO JULY 9, 1982...........

Today would have been my parents 61st Wedding Anniversary.  Remembering my parents wedding anniversary date was always easy in my family becausae it took place just four days after my mother's birthday, July 5th.  The usual celebration was a family dinner outdoors in the yard, perhaps barbequed chicken or rabbit,  but always including my father's home garden grown, tomatoes, corn on the cob, beans, peas, and watermelon; with perhaps some okra, as well.  They were relatively low key occasions.  In early July 1982, as I was preparing to enter the seminary, and depart for Kilkenny, Ireland; it occurred to me we should do something special to celebrate both my mother's 60th Birthday and my parents, 32nd Wedding Anniversary.  So I asked my mother what special way she wanted to celebrate the two occasions.  Her immediate response was to say, having heard me speak of going to the, "Zombie Hut", nightclub with Bob Butcher and other fraternity brothers, and having never gone there, she wanted to have dinner and take in the Polynesian floor show, at the Zombie Hut.  So on Friday night July9, 1982, my mother, father, brother Thomas and I, went to the Zombie Hut for dinner and the floor show.  Before our arrival, I had arranged with the maitre de' to have the, 'Anniversary Waltz', played by the band, so that my parents could dance to it.  That wasn;t easy to accomplish.  Our gun shy father would not get up and dance in such a public place, especially with the spotlight on him and my mother.  So a few of the polynesian dancing girls came down to our table to escort them to the dance floor.  I also ordered a round of the house specialty drink, Zombies, which my dad liked and drank down delightedly requesting a second.  Between the zombies, the dinner wine, the occasion, and the coaxing, of the floor show dancers, he gladly joined my mother on the dance floor, initially by themselves to dance !!   Their enhoyment of the dance, the floor show, as well as dinner and drinks, may it perhaps their most adventurous and memorable wedding anniversary.  It was also their last one, as less than five months later my month succumbed to her five and a half year struggle with diabetes and leukemia.  Ihave always been glad that we did something extra special to mark that birthday and anniversary, in the way my mother wanted to celebrate.  And now more than five years since my father's passing, I am pleased he and she had a night like that to celebrate their love and commitment to each other over more than three decades, a memory I pray, they are sharing today in eternity, twenty nine years later............With Love And Remembrance,   Troy David