A photograph of a couple in the prime of their lives speaks volumes to a loving son

This is a commentary by Mark Murphy, a local author and physician. He is a longtime contributor to the Savannah Morning News.

The photograph was taken in 1967, and it is simply beautiful.

My father was chief resident in surgery at the Macon Hospital in those days. My mother was a medical volunteer. The picture shows the two of them standing together, staring straight into the camera with the graceful insouciance of youth.

My dad is in scrubs, clearly straight out of the OR, a cloth mask draped around his neck. He’s standing bolt upright (something he finds more difficult these days), holding a patient chart in one hand, and his eyes are emerald green. My mother’s dark hair is cut short. She is wearing a light blue medical volunteer outfit and a pair of stylish cat’s-eye glasses. Behind them, a sign on the wall says, “Doctors Only.”

They were only 30 years old.

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We were all so very young. I was 5, my sister Jennifer was 3, and Andy was a baby. We were living in a house on Old Holton Road in Macon, just up a tree-studded hill from my grandparents Florence and W.A. Wommack, who I called Granmonce and Grandub.

It’s strange for me to realize that, in those days, Granmonce and Grandub were about the same age I am now.

The world was a busy place in 1967. The Vietnam War raged, Elvis married Priscilla, the Beatles released "Magical Mystery Tour," China tested its first hydrogen bomb, race riots broke out in Newark, New Jersey; Minneapolis; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Detroit, and anti-war protests rocked Washington, D.C.

On the positive side, the first test of the Saturn V rocket which would eventually carry men to the moon took place that year, as did the first flight of the supersonic Concorde jetliner. In South Africa, Christiaan Barnard performed the first heart transplant. It was the “Summer of Love,” a countercultural phenomenon beginning in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood characterized by hippie fashion, the widespread use of hallucinogenic drugs, and an anti-war and free love ethos, which reverberated from coast to coast.

My parents were not part of any of that.

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I attended kindergarten at Mrs. Millwood’s Sunshine Cottage. After school, I’d walk down to my grandparents’ house and eat apple slices out of a yellow plastic Captain Crunch bowl while watching cartoons on her huge color RCA console television. We had a tiny Zenith black-and-white TV at our house, and I’d watch "Captain Kangaroo" and "Romper Room" in the mornings and "Lassie," "The Walt Disney Show" and "Ed Sullivan" on Sunday nights.

My childhood was idyllic. Our biggest crises were nominal, petty things, like the day our toaster caught on fire (my mother extinguished the blaze by dumping a bunch of flour in it) or the time a hognose snake showed up writhing in our driveway with a frog stuck in its mouth. Looking back on those days, most of the credit for that angst-free youth goes to my parents, who were simply phenomenal, providing a home filled with love and affection.

A year or so after the picture was taken, my parents moved our family from the rolling red clay hills of central Georgia to the moss-draped environs of Savannah, on the coast. We lived on Sharondale Road, in Windsor Forest, as my dad began a stint at Tuttle Hospital as an Army surgeon. We were Savannahians from that point on, living in Ardsley Park and Habersham Woods, as my father built a surgical practice in the city he dearly loved.

In 1967, my parents were young. Their whole lives lay before them. They did not know at the time that they would only have 20 more years together.

Our family was torn apart in 1988. My mother lay down to sleep one night next to the man she loved and never woke up again. The pain of Peggy Murphy’s premature death has reverberated through our family for decades, its dark stain broadly and permanently tattooed on each of our souls.

But the 1967 photo of my parents is perfect. Frozen in time, it captures everything which makes life precious: Two people in love, their lives forever intertwined, their collective future brimming with the potential for great and wonderful things.

This summer, St. Joseph’s/Candler Health System honored my father with its “Health Care Legends” Award. It is a rare distinction, granted only to a handful of physicians. The centerpiece of that award is the 1967 portrait of my parents, now mounted in a hallway near the St. Joseph’s Doctors’ Lounge.

Gazing at it, I am filled with love, gratitude, and a whirling maelstrom of precious memories that all sprang from the two wonderful people who made me. I thank God for mama and daddy, for their love and support, and for everything else that the photo represents.

The picture is indeed beautiful. And they were, too.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Son offers tribute to parents as dad honored by St. Joseph's/Candler