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Elena and Ernesto Duran finally married after a decade of miscues. Elena wears the treasured pendant Ernesto bought on layaway after months of scrimping to surprise her on Mother’s Day more than 30 years ago. (Terrence Antonio James, Tribune Newspapers photo / July 26, 2012) |
She wrote Ernesto that she would go with her girlfriends and cousins to the Tabasco plaza where they'd first met. "If you don't like me, you just walk away but don't say anything. I will understand," she wrote him. "If you like what you see, then you say, 'Hola, buenas noches.'"
And he did. "He liked me," Elena says. And yes, "He still had the rosy cheeks, the beautiful eyelashes, everything I used to love about him."
Exactly one week later, on April 29, 1972, Ernesto proposed. "I said, 'Don't you think it's kind of soon?'" He didn't.
This was a Saturday and Elena wanted time to think it over back in her hometown, Aguascalientes. She said, "If I show up (in Tabasco) next Wednesday … that means it was a yes.'"
When she arrived in Tabasco on Wednesday it was already evening — "The old buses take forever." She immediately spotted her cousin Raul. "It's a small town. We're all related. I said, 'Raul, go and tell Ernesto that I'm here.' That's all he needed to know.
"It was a yes."
They were married the very next day, May 4, by a justice of the peace in Tabasco.
The following day, Elena wanted to phone her parents in Chicago to tell them the news, but it was Cinco de Mayo, and all the stores were closed, including the one that housed the only phone in town.
The next day, as planned, she returned to Chicago. Married or not, she had to go back to her job.
"He looked so handsome. How could I leave him? I cried when I had to say goodbye."
Arriving for her flight from Guadalajara, she finally got to a phone and told her parents the news. "My mom and my dad … were very shocked. My mom said, 'Let me get a chair because I think I'm going to faint.'"
Back in Chicago, Elena immediately got busy obtaining the paperwork for Ernesto to come to the United States, and on Jan. 27, 1973, they were married again, this time in a Catholic service at St. Francis of Assisi on the Near West Side.
But what about those 10 years they were apart? "I was always thinking about her," Ernesto says. "It was love at first sight." Together they raised four sons, now 32 to 38 years old.
Elena says Ernesto is not demonstrative like she is. "I'm the smoocher, the hugger, the kisser and the disciplinarian too." The boys would "listen more to her than me," Ernesto laughs.
"What I love about Ernesto is that he is a good man. He's a great father. He's a family man. He loves his sons. He loves me."
"We just work and work and work and raise the boys," Elena says. "We never had a honeymoon."
Never, that is, until this summer. For the first time in their lives, they took a trip, just the two of them — to Cancun.
"This is our trip. Just for ourselves," she says. "A honeymoon — 40 years after." She and Ernesto walked on the beach, watched the sunrise. "It was wonderful, just magical," she says.
"People say if you're apart, that those things don't happen. We didn't see each other for 10 years," Elena says. "If the spark is there it will be there forever."
Love lesson
Sometimes a first meeting is all you need to know that you've met the one you'll marry. "If the spark is there it will be there forever," says Elena Duran, who endured 10 years between the time she first met Ernesto and the second time she saw him — and married him 12 days later.
— E.W.
