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He won many awards including the National Headliners Club award for writing the best local interest column in the country in 1962. In 1977 his fellow Tri-State Journalists honored him with with the first Distinguished Service Award. He is the author of five book: A Pig In The Gray Panel Truck, A Dandelion in Winter, Day of a President, Just a 100 Miles From Home, and The Journey in the Red Jalopy. He worked for newspapers in Santa Fe, N.M., Monett, MO, Beckley WV, and Memphis, TN. He began working for the Evansville Courier in 1957. Aaron was born in Cone, Texas and reared on a farm in Portales, NM. He attented the University of New Mexico where he graduated with honors with a degree in journalism.
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by Joe Aaron The bride, as they say of brides in society page stories, was radiant, and the month was June.
She smiled and waved ecstatically from the car, which was fittingly decorated with old shoes and gaudy signs and gay streamers of crepe paper.
Her recently acquired husband, a youngster in dark suit, sat at the wheel, seemingly a bit misplaced and baffled.
It was a picture that you have seen a dozen times or more - the young newlyweds riding away on their honeymoon, as giddy as they will scarcely ever be again, and with so much to learn.
They have courted and wed and they are blissfully together now, and their problems, they believe, are all behind them.
Which only shows, of course, their youth and inexperience, for they still believe, you see, that marriage is an endless idyll of moonlight and roses.
We who have lived longer know better but if we told them, they would not listen to us now. They are too rapt, too transfixed by their emotions, and what we have to say does not apply the THEM.
And marriage, they are convinced, consists mostly of hugs and kisses and the Hollywood fadeout, and living happily ever after in a Shangri-La sort of place.
It's not, of course; it's vastly more than that, and the love between a man and a woman must be strong and sinewy to endure.
Marriage is morning sickness and midnight colic, and an asthmatic jalopy that often will not start.
Marriage is pumps that go bad and teeth that need fixing and an outbreak of cockroaches in the kitchen.
Marriage is dirty dishes and dirty diapers and stubborn lawnmowers and bills, eternally, that must be paid.
Marriage is never having quite enough money to go around, and moonlighting for a few extra dollars, and seeing something pretty in the store window that you cannot buy for your beloved, because the car payment is due.
Marriage, too often, is living in the bargain basement - and buying your only luxuries with savings stamps.
Marriage is slowly saving - a dollar at a time, or a quarter - for something you really want, only to have the car break down, or the water heater develop a fatal illness, or the refrigerator gasp its last, and take it all in a twinkling.
Marriage is no simple thing, and there are no schools to teach you.
But marriage is more than all of this - much more - else its popularity would certainly decline.
There is such a thing as true love, but it is a thing unknown to the newlyweds, smitten with romance as they are; it is something that can be tempered only by the fires of time and hardship.
Marriage is dreaming together - sitting propped up in bed, late at night, excitedly planning ways and means of buying something - a car, say, or a fancy stereo - that you cannot afford.
Maybe you will never buy it; maybe the harsh light of day will absorb the illusions and sweep away the grand excitement.
But at least you have dreamed a common dream; the wondrous mirage was there for you both to see.
Marriage is standing shoulder to shoulder with your true love and facing the adversities of life together, and laughing together, and sometimes crying.
Marriage is having somebody you love above all others - and, just as important, somebody you like - always at your side, so that if you a waken from a bad dream deep in the scary night, you can reach across and there she is, and you realize with relief that you have only dreamed a bad dream.
And sometimes you can snarl at her, because you are in a bad mood, and she will understand and not be mad.
And it's all something the youngsters in their honeymoon car cannot yet realize, for theirs is the merest beginning of the fairytale, and not its end
