It’s strange the things that can bring back memories.
I have two friends who are big fans of Donald Trump. One is stronger than the other in his love for the former president, but both are pretty solidly anti-Democrat.
It has been a long time since I have seen either one — eight years for one and 39 years for the other. I can see how the first one evolved into your basic Trumpanzee, but I have no idea what took one I haven’t seen for 39 years in that direction.
This post isn’t about politics, though. When I thought about these two friends, I realized that they were two of the four men who had stood up for me at my first wedding in 1975. Both are Facebook friends of mine, and so are the other two from that wedding.
Thinking about them got me thinking about 1975. The first half of that year might have been the happiest six months of my twenties, the first time really good things and very few bad things happened.
The wedding happened in April, but the first great thing was in February, when my fiancee and I moved into an apartment together. Other than college dorms, I was 25 and it was the first time I had lived apart from my parents. She was four years younger, but had been on her own with roommates since she had finished high school.
We moved into a new apartment complex in Herndon, a good distance to the west of Washington. She had been living in Alexandria and I have no idea what put us onto Herndon. Stuart Woods, the new community, had three different types of apartments — one bedroom and one bath, two bedrooms and one bath and two bedrooms and two baths. The apartments had a feature most didn’t — built-in washers and dryers.
The price was reasonable at the time and sounds impossible now. Our rent was $230 a month and that included utilities. I looked at the Stuart Woods website for prices 49 years later and saw the cheapest vacancies were more than $1,900 and didn’t include utilities.
I think it was the middle of the month when we moved in. We didn’t have much in the way of furniture. We didn’t even own a bed, although we had a mattress and box spring on the floor in the bedroom. We had my parents’ old dining room set, and we bought a brand-new sofa for our living room.
Nice sofa. Just $200.
Yeah, 1975 was a lot cheaper.
We got married two months later, and we had the reception in our community center.
If there is one thing I noticed when I returned to Northern Virginia in 2010, it was how much the area around Reston and Hernon had boomed. When we lived there in 1975, we were on the north side of Herndon and practically rural. Just south of us in downtown Herndon was a movie theatre that I think had two screens.
My wife worked at CIA headquarters in Langley and commuted with a couple who lived in Stuart Woods. I drove our only car, a 1972 Pinto, to my job as a night manager of a Jack in the Box. In June I got a government job in Arlington with the Social Security Administration and we got a second car, a 1973 Camaro.
I’ve had nicer apartments, in 1989 in Sparks, Nev., and in 1991 in Anaheim, Calif. I lived alone in both those places, and considering how many years had elapsed, the rents weren’t outrageous — $400 in Nevada and $590 in Orange County. In fact, if I had to choose the nicest apartment I ever had, it would probably have been in Nevada.
But by then I was already sort of burned out. Being 25 in Herndon, I still believed that wonderful things were possible. We only lived in that apartment for 15 months, and while I may be looking through the fabled rose-colored glasses, I remember 15 months of no bad memories at all.
Huh.