Great Grandma Katie and Doug, Part 2

 But Where are the Wedding Pictures?

Anniversary Celebration at the Gold Hill Inn

   As you learned in Part One,  just as Doug and I began seeing each other,  I accepted a job as an English professor at Southern Utah University in Cedar City.  That was in January 1989. Why did I do that? Quite simple. I was finishing my doctorate and living on the salary of a part time graduate instructor at the University of Colorado.  The position that opened up was a tenure track position, much more money and a real job. I was in need of both. 

    Doug and I had a long talk about what my move would mean for our relationship that was only just beginning.  Here's what we decided. I was 49 years old and Doug was 51. We had found a deep connection with one another this late in our lives. While we didn't make any real commitment at first, we did promise that we would keep in touch with one another until the summer, when I would return to Boulder to finish my dissertation before heading back to Cedar City for the fall semester.  So we wrote letters back and forth to one another. Email hadn't quite caught on at that time. 

    Summertime came, and I headed back to Boulder, where André, who was 11, and I rented a room in the house of a professor at CU. Doug and I then started seeing each other quite often. We went to plays together and took hikes and played with André, who had just gotten his first skateboard. We went for ice cream, because that’s what families do, although I don’t really like ice cream. I worked hard on my dissertation, and Doug taught summer school. 

    Just as I was getting ready to return to my job in Cedar City, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. That was a pretty terrifying and disruptive time, but you can see that I’m still here.  I had surgery and other treatments, and I got a six month leave from my teaching. Doug took me to his house from the hospital, and I recovered there until time for me to go back to teaching in January of 1990.  I did manage to work on my dissertation, but I did not manage to finish it. 

    So this is what our life looked like after I returned to Cedar City to teach. We were younger and had more energy, so we each made the 600 mile trip (1200 miles round trip) once a month, meaning that we saw one another every two weeks.  When Doug was in Cedar City, he mostly helped me care for André, so I would go back to my office after dinner and work on the dissertation. He and André and friends would go hiking or to the video store or to a nearby pond to hunt for tadpoles.  

    I did finish my dissertation in 1990, so I became Dr. Cook. Doug and I then married in the summer of 1991, June 22, to be exact, at St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church in Boulder. Yes. The very same church where we said our final farewell to Doug on August 25, 2024.

    But where are the wedding pictures you ask. We had a lot. My brother-in law, Charles, took reels and reels and as a wedding present, sent the pictures to us in a beautiful tin box.  We loved looking at those pictures, of all the people and all of our beautiful family.

    But alas! In the flood of 2013 (that is another story, of course) , we lost everything—the house and everything in it and our cars, washed away be the avalanche of water that thundered down Gold Run Road. The wedding pictures are no more. They had never been digitized, and that was long before iPhones, etc. All we had were the hard copies. And this one of Catherine and Brett. I don't know how it survived.

Catherine & Brett, June 22, 1991

 

    Here is the one thing, the thing that Doug and I always recommended to couples in long distance relationships: In the almost 20 years that we lived 600 miles apart, we talked on the phone before bedtime every single night. In all that time we might have missed two or three nights, but no more.

    A low estimate of how many miles we traveled between Boulder Colorado and Cedar City, Utah when we were commuting: 162,000. Shall we put that in perspective? It's about 25,000 miles around the world if we were to start at the equator.  That means we did a trip around the world approximately six and a half times.  Or...the moon is about 238,000 miles from the earth, so if we were in space, we would have traveled halfway to the moon!!!