Our Wedding Anniversary

 I put this video together for our 43rd wedding anniversary and I’m looking at it again tonight as we approach anniversary number 44. It’s joke between us that we tend to forget our anniversary or rather we tend to remember it a week or two after it happens. I don’t think that’s possible anymore since Cinco de Mayo has become such a recognized holiday but I swear I don’t think I ever heard of it back in day when we got married or maybe that’s because all I could think about in those days was how much in love I was with Tess and how much in love we were with each other. It was like the music was talking just to us. I didn’t have the poetic chops but Billy Joel seemed to capture everything we were feeling. 

I don’t want clever conversation, I never want to work that hard, I just want someone that I can talk too… I love you just the way you are. 

Since then I’ve played that song a thousand times and on countless trips to Charleston but this is how it all began.

I was completely new in town and starting a brand new job as a Social Worker at the School for the Deaf and the Blind. We met each other in a classroom training session where the female teacher was demonstrating the language that kids used in talking with each other. As she exclaimed words like “Screw” and other expletives we suppressed our laughter in embarrassment for her. Then, catching a glance, we introduced ourselves and in telling me her name Tess Train, she added that her name would soon be changing back to her maiden name, Carter. Tess Carter, she told me and of course I told her mine, Pete Tintle. Never dreaming in that moment that our names would soon share that last name in common, that Pete and Tess would become our handle for the next years and decades to come or that our daughter Lauren would someday graduate from the finest school in South Carolina. We were just saying hello. 

We haven’t argued about that particular first meeting which led to the Policeman’s Ball in October and sharing our first Christmas as a family, Peter, Tess and Eric soon after that. But before that encounter I remember noticing Tess at the school infirmary. She was wearing a red sweater contrasting with her white uniform when I went there to donate blood. I can still see her in my minds eye, leaning against the wall as I lay on the gurney. Her eyes had a sparkle and she had such a kind and slightly shy smile. Ok, so maybe she did not take my blood as she insists, but she did steal my heart. 

There is something about true love that when you have it you know it and very soon I knew it.

We were married by her father, who we knew as Papa.

That was in May on May 5th of 1978. But we were married again in June, hosted by Tess’s brother Barry and his wife Shirley, this time for and with my parents

and my sister Linda who came to South Carolina to share in our wedding experience. And that was it. Our families and our friends Dave and Alice.

It was a most intimate, wonderful and beautiful wedding. We were So Much In Love! It was truly beyond anything I had ever imagined, honestly because I never really imagined it. In some ways I think I always assumed it would happen I just had no idea to who or when. But now, just a little later that evening, we jumped into my little green Gremlin

and headed down to Charleston for our honeymoon. A Friday night wedding with a weekend honeymoon. I was so excited I literally raced down the highway. I say raced because we were pulled over nearing Charleston for speeding. The cop flashed his blue lights behind us and I pulled to the side of the road, my heart pounding. He explained that we were speeding and that it was a $40 dollar ticket. I said ok, expecting a ticket, but then he said Pay me Here, Now! Are you kidding me? But we’re on our honeymoon… Do you want to go down to the station? I reached into my wallet and turned over two twenty dollar bills which represented about half of our honeymoon money. I was in shock. I’m still a little shocked by it. Was it real? Yes. Was it legit? I’ll never know. Nonetheless and not to be discouraged, we continued on and checked into the King Charles Inn on Meeting Street. The entire weekend was a whirlwind. We ate dinner in a place called the Ice Box and walked in and out of all the shops on Meeting Street.  We took pictures of churches and ladies making straw baskets

and had our picture taken in historic clothes.

We would have taken a carriage tour of Charleston but our tour money was given to the policeman so we followed along close behind on our bikes and listened to hear as much as we could. As my mind wanders back I think they were called the Rainbow Shops or Rainbow Row which was totally appropriate because in our hearts and without a skinny nickel between us, we had discovered true love and we had landed at the end of the rainbow.