'To Solemnize the Marriage Contract'

My nephew and I spent the morning going through a plastic storage box filled with photos, documents, newspaper clippings and other oddments Abe inherited from my brother after his death last year. What did we find? 

My mother’s 1920 birth certificate (“Legitimate?” “Yes”).

 

The naturalization certificate of my paternal grandfather, Charles Kurpiewski, a Polish immigrant, dated September 17, 1920.

My mother’s autograph book. An entry dated December 7, 1939 (two years to the day before Pearl Harbor), signed by Marion Kolorrics, addressed “Dear Edyth [sic]”:

 

“Love is to the human heart,

What sunshine is to flowers,

But friendship is the truest thing,

In this cold world of ours.”                 

My parents’ marriage license (“to solemnize the Marriage Contract between the persons aforesaid”) signed by Probate Judge Nelson J. Brewer on September 19, 1950.

 

A booklet titled “The Marriage Service” signed by the Rev. Elmer G. Wiest of Trinity Evangelical and Reformed Church on W. 25th Street in Cleveland on September 16, 1950.

 

An album of photos taken on my parents’ wedding day. My mother was thirty-one, my father was thirty and still had hair. They look impossibly young. A picture of my mother’s four brothers, all in tuxes, looks like an outtake from The Godfather. A photo of my Uncle Virgil toasting with a bottle of whiskey and my Uncle Richard with a tankard of beer.

 

A photo of me, my parents and brother seated around a table at the Coach House in Strongsville, Ohio (“Family Style Dining”), on March 10, 1968 – my mother’s forty-eighth birthday. My father, typically, is scowling.

 

Back in my room I reread Delmore Schwartz’s story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” Me in junior high school, c. 1965: