Backstory: Life is All About Choices…

Our Memoir Explores Our Triangular Love Story—Against a Backdrop of Social Change in the Sixties

Ready for some crazy stories? You’ve come to the right place.

Hello and welcome! Drop your backpack and settle in for conversation and stories—the kind to be retold around the campfire, or at a family reunion: How did an angry letter almost get Terry kicked out of the University of Colorado? How did Ann wind up driving her soldier-boyfriend’s shiny Sting Ray convertible into a ditch on the way to Saint-Tropez?

How, indeed? A lot of our stories—yours and ours, all of us—come down to choices we make. If only I had said this, or done that, things would have turned out differently . . . How many times have you heard that—or thought it? And many of us have had unanticipated adventures out of carefully thought through—or random—choices we have made. All make for great stories!

Life is all about choices—what to be when we grow up, whom to marry, what to do on Saturday night, how to respond to a bully, how to protect an ideal. Some choices send us down pathways we never imagined, some good, some bad, all of them lessons in life.

A Rendezvous to Remember is a memoir that retraces the bumpy trail of how we came to marry, a choice that set us on a path to adventures around the world: the Philippines, Mexico, Canada, the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Fiji, Nauru, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Puerto Rico, Peru, Argentina, Guatemala, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, Costa Rica, and Italy, Germany, France, and other destinations in Europe. And more of our favorite stories.

We think this is one of our best stories yet, so come join us. Our memoir is chock full of juicy stories. Some, funny. Some, thrilling. Some, sad. Some, embarrassing. Some, even, shocking.

All of them hinge on choices we’ve made along the way. Some may spark memories of your own.

The road to A Rendezvous to Remember began with a simple question, “How should we celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary?” With a straight face, Terry said, “Let’s redo the trip that you and Jack Sigg took in the summer of ’64. You and me. Together.” Ann’s response: “What, are you nuts?”

And a Memoir Is Born . . .

Apparently, we’re both nuts, because fifty years after the fact, we re-traced Ann’s European trip with her soldier-boyfriend and turned the summer of 1964 into a memoir.

On the trip re-do and in the writing we scoured our memories, our letters, old newspapers, searched out people who knew of the times back then, and resurrected nuggets that neither of us knew or fully understood at the time. Others were secrets we had buried that none of our families or friends knew—until now. Embarrassing or not, these stories and the choices we made insisted on coming back to life as part of our story.

So welcome to our new meeting place, where we share our best stories. Bring your friends. And if you want to travel back in time with us to our earlier adventures, sign up below for our occasional news flashes.

Terry and Ann Marshall

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