Tag: marriage

Exploring North Carolina: Vineyards, Memories, and Family

May 15, 2024

Sitting in the sun, shaded partly by an umbrella at Shelton’s vineyard in North Carolina, was hugely relaxing. Helping the relaxation was the Cabernet Sauvignon that we sipped. The food was average: pulled pork on an open sandwich base, or perhaps it was a pizza. I am not sure, but it tasted like pub food, appropriate in the setting.

Driving away from the lush meadows of the Yadkin Valley where Shelton’s grows its grapes, my thoughts turned towards the many times we visited North Carolina over the last few decades, and my memory lane took me back to the first time I drove to Chapel Hill, NC.

That was when the Dean of the Graduate School of City Planning welcomed me with an open smile; Jack Parker welcomed each planning student. His intimate reception touched me, and he generated a feeling that I’d succeed in my studies. It was a competitive program, but I have known no one who failed. The UNC Planning School admitted me for the January session; I applied to many other Ivy League schools, but UNC took me mid-year, and I accepted the offer, not waiting for the other schools to respond. But let me explain how I decided to attend planning school.

After graduating from the School of Architecture at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, I worked with a small architectural firm in Vancouver. I lasted six months before getting bored with mundane designs of lobbies for high-rise buildings put up by developers. Another job with an even smaller firm was more interesting: designing a recreation center for a specific location in Vancouver. This project came about as a request for proposals for a competition our firm did not win.

After my brief experience with two architectural firms, I decided that I did not fit the mold of an architect. Architecture envisions plenty of attractive and well-appointed living spaces unavailable for most people worldwide. Architecture is irrelevant to people who have no choice but to tolerate less attractive environments. So, that was the impetus for me to search for a new field of endeavor. City planning appeared to be a related field, so I started applying to graduate planning schools in the fall, which is how I ended up in Chapel Hill in January.

When I arrived, I felt I was in paradise, experiencing southern hospitality and the positive energy generated by, and friendships made with, the planning students. Living at a campus-type university was another positive for me; UBC was a city university where moststudents lived off-campus. In contrast, campus life at UNC was rich with lectures and performances I could attend. For example, at the annual Jubilee Music Festival in the spring, I listened to Johnny Cash while sitting with thousands of students on the ground of the quadrangle. It was a memorable concert. 

Another primary reason North Carolina holds deep memories is that I spent considerable time with my future wife during our second year there. Although we met in Washington, DC, where we both had summer jobs, upon returning to UNC for our second year, we saw each other daily, starting with breakfast in thestudent dining room,Lenoir Hall, when it cost forty cents. And we spent many evenings talking late into the night at the Rathskeller, a student pub in Chapel Hill. We married at year’s end at the Anglican Church on the campus with family and all my classmates in attendance. The audience had a big laugh when the newlyweds left in the car with a colossal ruckus created by the rocks my friends put into the hubcaps of our vehicle.

A career launch and meeting my lifelong partner provide deep roots in North Carolina. But there is more to it. Our three children applied to US universities after finishing high school in Ontario. Although they did get into Canadian universities, they thought going to American schools would be more adventurous, perhaps influenced by their parent’s experience there. The upshot of their leaving Canada was that Tony and David attended UNC in Chapel Hill, while Megan graduated from Duke University in Durham.

They married after graduating from university; the two boys married North Carolina girls and settled in Charlotte and Durham. Further, Kathy’s brother, Huw, retired from Washington, DC to Winston-Salem, near where his wife had grown up. Our recent visits to North Carolina span from Charlotte to Winston-Salem to Durham, all of these locations along Interstate 40, within three hours of driving time.

Innumerable opportunities have existed to visit our children and their growing families in North Carolina, share a vacation, help them move, or see them. Over the years, I wore out several car tires along Interstate 81, driving from Ottawa to North Carolina. However, the visits have also provided opportunities to see the state and enjoy what it offers.

Huw and Judy introduced us to vineyards while driving around Wiinston-Salem. With the decay of the tobacco industry, growing grapes had taken over the rich agricultural soil. My attraction to visiting vineyards goes beyond sipping wines; they happen in areas with lush vegetation on rolling hills, with a lake and a fountain facing the tasting room.

Having visited Shelton’s vineyard, where the wine was tasty, but the food was not the best, we decided to visit Shadow Springs Vineyards with Huw and Judy on our last visit before returning to Ottawa. They do not have a restaurant, and since we do not sip wine without some food at lunchtime, we stopped at the Shiloh General Store in Hammondville to pick up a sandwich.

Amish people run the store, and the owner, Phil Graber, was on cash. I learned from him that the area has over fifty Amish families. Phil and his wife Mary established the store in the early 2000s and expanded it to over thirty-five hundred square feet. The store sells homemade products with fresh ingredients, such as pickled vegetables, dry soup mixes, Amish noodles, pretzels, and crackers.

They made a tasty sandwich for us. I found their order-taking fascinating. You choose on a piece of paper the type of bread, meat, spread, vegetables, and sides you want and place it in a window. Then, they prepare the sandwich and call your name. There was no limit on what you could ask for, and I thought, why not order pulled pork and chicken under meats? And low and behold, my sandwich had both meats!

Armed with our sandwich, we entered Shadow Springs’ tasting room. Judy selected a 2022 Seyval Blancand a2022 Chardonnay while we settled at a table on the lakefront, cranking up the umbrella to provide shade from the sun’s heat at midday. The chatty hostess in the tasting room described how Chuck Johnson, the owner, decided to retire from his corporate job to his home state and look for another career opportunity after missing too many of his son’s ball games. Chuck and his wife Mary went winetasting upon their return to NC and decided that winemaking might be an excellent opportunity for starting a new life. They looked at dozens of farms for sale until they found this piece of land with the proper orientation and soil qualities to make wine. They started making wine in 2005.

And we were not disappointed with their wines. We spent the two-hour lunch sipping wine in sunny weather, sitting outside with a huge fountain making a bubbling sound in the middle of the lake next to us. What a way to spend our last day in North Carolina before returning to Ottawa, where the trees were getting leafy.  

How Did You Meet Your Spouse

November 12, 2022

That was the question at a celebration of a friend’s sixtieth wedding anniversary. We were looking at pictures of the couple’s past activities going back decades when someone popped the question. After the wife related how a “blind date” experience in Montreal led to an amazing sixty years of marriage, somebody spoke up and wanted to know how others, present at the celebration, met. I had no chance to relate my story; the conversation turned to how long it took from meeting your spouse to the wedding.

So here is my story. It started with my first car: a Peugeot 403 that I bought in Vancouver, in the early 1960s. I drove my car to North Carolina to attend graduate school in January 1965.

During the summer of 1965, I, along with two other graduate students studying city planning at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, had summer jobs in Washington, DC.

Ray rented a cheap apartment painted all black; it was unbearably hot with no AC. Another classmate, Alvaro, and I rented a room at Hartnett House off Dupont Circle. It was a bit of a flophouse. Our room had a window facing inwards onto a courtyard, with no air-conditioning and no fans.

If you know Washington’s weather during the summer, you know how steamy and hot it can be. Going to the beach one weekend was a wonderful idea, and since I was the only one with a car, I drove all of us to the beach in my Peugeot.

Alvaro invited Kathy to come with us to the beach. Kathy was a graduate student as well, studying economics and political science at UNC.

As soon as we arrived at the beach, Ray and Alvaro went to play the slot machines in the arcade. Kathy and I started talking about school life and hit it off immediately; we discovered we were both newcomers to North America and shared details of our growing up here. In those days we called stealing your friend’s date “birddogging”.

During the summer, Kathy and I got to know each other while discovering Rock Creek Park, going to nightclubs with blaring music, and eating at fish bistros along the Potomac. Our relationship hit a high point when her mother invited me for dinner. She was an experienced cook; the chicken meat just fell off the bones. I enjoyed the dinner and told her so. That pleased her. I was in.

I asked her to marry me three weeks after meeting her and bought her a skinny ring that I could afford from my meagre earnings that summer. But promised that I would replace the ring with a much larger ring as soon as I could buy one; I did so later when my job took me to the Yukon, where I bought her a wide gold ring.

The summer ended, and we had to go back to university. I suddenly got worried that if I spend so much time with Kathy, my studies will suffer. But as soon as we were back at school, we saw each other every day, starting with breakfast at Lenoir Hall, the student cafeteria.

We planned the church wedding for June 7, 1966, right after graduation, in Chapel Hill. But I had a suggestion; let us get married in a civil ceremony before the church wedding. We hustled off to South Carolina so that no one would know of our marriage and got married in the courthouse by a Justice of the Peace. I did not think the props in the courthouse measured up to the significance of the event; a couple of flowerpots did not provide the right background for taking a vow for life. But it was a marriage, and we had the certificate to prove it.

Our courthouse marriage burned an unforgettable memory in my mind; two grad students in a small South Carolina town, far from family, getting married, with nobody around who knew us, casually dressed, and making a contract for life. I thought it was surrealistic but deeply emotional and tremendously exciting.

This unique experience overwhelmed us, and nothing could break our spirits, not even when my faithful old car, the Peugeot 403, broke down on the drive back to Chapel Hill and we had to hitchhike back home. We just left the car on the highway; I took the license plates off it so people could not trace the car back to me. Disposal of the car was the last thing on my mind right after our union.

I cannot describe in words how excited and happy I felt being married, nobody knowing about it, not even my family, and going back to my dorm and Kathy going back to her dorm where she was a student councilor (her dorm students would have been flabbergasted to know what their advisor/councilor just did. This was in the sixties!).

The preparations for the church wedding took some other interesting turns; the pastor at the  Chapel of the Cross Episcopal Church who was to perform the wedding ceremony asked if religion would cause a problem for us. Kathy is Episcopal and I am Catholic. I assured the pastor that religion would not be an issue; I was a non-practicing Catholic and could not see myself launching into heavy arguments over religious doctrines.

Kathy’s brother Huw, whom I just met the day before the wedding, and my friend Ray, took me out for a few drinks; explaining that it was a custom to do so. On the day of the wedding, I got up a bit groggy and searched around for my formal clothing only to find I did not have a tie. I walked down the dorm corridor hall knocking on doors until I found a classmate happy to lend me one. I was ready to marry the second time.

My entire city planning class showed up for the wedding and had a great laugh when I tried to drive off in Kathy’s car. They put rocks in front and back of the tires, and I could not drive off until I got out of the car and cleared the rocks to the laughter of all. And when I drove off, a terrible racket came from the hubcaps; my friends put rocks into them as well. I drove off and stopped a block away to take the hubcaps off to get rid of the stones before driving off to our honeymoon.

Although I did not have the opportunity at the celebration to relate my story, I reflected on a marriage that lasted over sixty years. What I found more significant is that only one percent of couples in the U.S. can celebrate 60 years of marriage. I could not find similar statistics for Canada. I also found that an average marriage lasts fifteen years in Canada. So, a sixty-year marriage is an incredible achievement. Congratulations.