The young man was the son of a rancher from southern Colorado, and one day, while driving through town, he spotted a girl walking down the street. She sang in church, and it was there they would strike up their first conversations. When he embarked upon a more formal courtship, he visited her home and sat on a chair at a distance deemed appropriate by her father.
“One day, I saw her and I asked her if she’d be interested in marrying me, and she said, ‘yes,’ ” the man, no longer young, recounts.
“Wait,” his daughter says, interrupting the story. “Just like that?”
“No dating?” asks his other daughter.
“My father was a very strict man,” their mother says. “He never let me go anywhere. We never dated or did anything. I was even embarrassed when I married him.”
Their daughters erupt in laughter.
When the then-young man declared he had found his future wife, his parents dressed in their best clothing and went to visit her father to present their son’s case. It was the custom of the day to say that when a proposal had been rejected, the prospective groom had been given a pumpkin. Upon their parents’ return, the young man’s siblings searched for, but did not find, any member of the squash family.
Shortly thereafter, the bride-to-be was brought to her future in-laws’ house, where they had her sit in the middle of the living room for the family’s inspection.
They were married at St. Augustine church in Antonito. Ruben Sala zar was 21. Emma Lucero was almost 19. On Thursday, they will have been married 75 years.
It’s customary to honor longevity for longevity’s sake. We like to celebrate it as endurance. It suggests a marshaling of inner forces, strength and wisdom. Continued existence is seen as a willful act, a defiance of the odds. To possessors of such longevity we attribute secrets unknown to most of us. More often than not, no such secret exists. Longevity in a relationship can be as much a product of inertia and resignation as it is love and work.
The Salazars’ accomplishment is not simply the duration of their marriage. No, it is that when they watch television, he rests his hand upon her knee and she lays her hand upon his. It is that they still kiss each other goodbye, and when he awakens in the morning, he makes her breakfast and takes out her pills. It is that she is almost blind and he almost deaf, but they need neither sight nor hearing to know the other’s heart.
“I love him dearly,” she tells me.
“Our love will be there as long as we live,” he says.
They sit together on their sofa, and he says: “We just never thought we would be apart.” And she says the same.
No marriage is perfect. It is the expectation of perfection that dooms so many relationships, the idea that a good marriage happens all on its own and that love conquers all, when neither is true.
The Salazars work at it, even now, though they long ago learned one cannot change the other and a person must pick and choose his or her battles.
When they were two days married, Mr. Salazar awakened to realize he had a wife and no steady job, and he said to her, “I never should have married you.”
“Why don’t you go home then?” she said, and he left.
He returned that evening, and he said, “I promise I will never say anything like that again. I promise I will never leave you again.”
He kept his promise. She says: “We get mad, then we mend it together.”
Their daughter Thelma arranged a party for them this past Sunday. They went to church at St. Caje tan’s. They wore flowers in their lapels and sat in the front pew, and Father Tomas blessed them.
Afterward they went to the Regency Hotel for roast beef and mashed potatoes. Thelma, their other two children, Beatrice and Gilbert, grandchildren and great-grandchildren helped them celebrate. After dinner, Salazar’s younger brother, Jim, offered a tribute. He spoke of their life in Las Sauces, of their move to Denver in the mid-’50s, of their children and jobs. The last 15 years of his working life, Ruben Salazar was the supervisor of the grounds at the Governor’s Residence.
If one were to look for secrets to their marriage, Jim Salazar offered a few: “Optimism rather than pessimism; hope rather than despair; joy rather than guilt or sin; tolerance in place of fear; love instead of hatred; and compassion instead of selfishness.”
Ruben and Emma Salazar still wear their original wedding rings. The gold bands have worn thin over time. Seventy-five years together, of love and work and children, of seeing their own kids have long marriages of their own, of burying and mourning two sons, of washing dishes and pulling weeds and cleaning beans and crocheting, of making a life.
Her ring is the barest sliver of a band now. But it’s still strong. She takes it off to show me and then slips it back on.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thurs- days and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
