SUMMER OF LOVE: This is first in a seven-part series in which Colorado couples share their stories of love, dedication and commitment. Every Thursday in The Denver Post through July.

Cecil Bethea stoops forward as he puts his octogenarian oomph into pushing partner Carl Shepherd’s wheelchair.

There’s a chance you might have seen the pair about town.

There’s Bethea leaning into the incline in front of Little Man Ice Cream in Denver’s Lower Highland neighborhood. There the pair sits sharing a smoke outside the Denver Art Museum, where Bethea volunteered for 18 years. There they are, making their way along the 16th Street Mall. Shepherd wears sunglasses and a straw hat pulled down tight; Bethea’s bus pass hangs on a lanyard, the ubiquitous pack of Pyramid cigarettes peeking out from his breast pocket.

Images of the pair can offer a beautiful if melancholy tableau: There’s old Sisyphus pushing his burden, you sigh.

So the determined clip Bethea employs as he wheeled Shepherd along Bannock Street one warm Memorial Day morning came as a surprise. Bethea, 84, and Shepherd, 72, joined those gathered to mark the second year there has been a GLBT color guard at the Memorial Day parade. Each served in the Air Force; Bethea in the 1950s; Shepherd from 1958-62.

As the younger servicemen and women begin to take their places, Bethea pushes Shepherd toward the long, white Cadillac Eldorado they’ll be waving from.

For their 44 years together, Bethea has been the driver in this relationship. When they went to visit Shepherd’s family in Helena, Mont., he was behind the steering wheel of their Pontiac Safari station wagon (they had a series of them). Ditto their trips to Birmingham, Ala., where Bethea (pronounced Buh-THAY) was raised.

Bethea’s role as wheelchair chauffeur is a relatively recent one. In December 2011, Shepherd had a stroke. He went to the hospital, then on to a nursing home. The Spearly Center deals primarily with residents living with mental illness, neurological disorders or a brain injury. Shepherd has been diagnosed with dementia and since the stroke has not returned to the two-story home the pair had shared in northwest Denver since 1974. If he does return, it will likely be only for brief visits.

The uneven decline of beloveds is a common fate of uncommonly long marriages. There doesn’t have to be rhyme or reason to the fact an 84-year-old is doing his darndest to tend to a younger mate in decline. It is just a fact. It doesn’t matter to the pair that they are men together, only that they have built a life together.

“When he first got sick, two or three people said it was so good of me to stick with him. And my reaction was, ‘What am I supposed to do?'” Bethea says. “It seemed to me that it was understood that we were going to stick together.”

Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post Cecil Bethea shaves the face of his partner, Carl Shepherd, on March 29 during one of Cecil's many visits to The Spearly Center, where Carl lives, in Denver, Colorado. Cecil bathes and shaves Carl's face every other day. "As I remember in the old time wedding vows there was a phrase in there, 'In sickness and in health,'" Cecil says. "Well this is certainly sickness. And if I didn't do it, who would? I'm the only one he has."

Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post Cecil Bethea struggles up a hill with his partner, Carl Shepherd, after a trip to Little Man Ice Cream in Denver, Colorado on April 4, 2013. At 83-years-old Cecil says his commitment can be challenging at times but he knows the outings are important to Carl, "Of course, I think anybody in his position would feel this way. I just can't take him out five or six days a week. I don't know what he can see and what he can't. I think he just likes the idea of getting out of the home."

Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post Cecil Bethea, left, and his partner, Carl Shepherd, toast with a friend to celebrate Carl's 72nd birthday at My Brother's Bar on March 22, 2013 in Denver, Colorado. The couple agrees they met in a bar in 1969 but differ on the location. "There was a dispute we've never settled about where we met. I say it was in Mary's Bar and Carl says it was the Backdoor. But we did meet," Cecil recalled. "He came up and asked me a silly question. We got to talking and we spent the night together. We decided to see each other again. For lack of a better term you can say we dated for about 8 months. We got to know each other and finally I think it was about Thanksgiving Carl suggested that we live together."



Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post Cecil Bethea and his partner Carl Shepherd ride the shuttle of the 16th Street Mall in Denver during an outing to the art museum in Denver, Colorado on March 29, 2013. The couple met in 1969 and Cecil recalls it fondly, "Wordsworth said this, 'To be young was very heaven,' and we were young in those days. It was sort of like not having enough money, it was an inconvenience being gay and having to work around the system. But you could still have a damn good time."

Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post Cecil Bethea gets his partner Carl Shepherd ready for an outing at The Spearly Center in Denver, CO March 29, 2013. Cecil says that the couple never understood stereotypes. "This goes back to the olden days," Cecil remembers, "when men paired off they would ask the question, 'Who's the husband and who's the wife?' Well, Carl did crochet and car repairs and I did the cooking and the bookkeeping. So we didn't fit any kind of stereotype." For some reason we did not like the word lovers, that's a bit pretentious, so we just decided we were partners."

Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post Cecil Bethea arrives at The Spearly Center to spend a day with his partner Carl Shepherd in Denver, CO March 29, 2013. He waves through a window in a secured wing where Carl lives. Marriage was never an option for the couple and Cecil explains that it never will be. He recalled a conversation the couple had 30 years ago and Carl's remarks about living together, "We've done pretty well the way we are, why don't we just leave it at that?' This was strictly a theoretical discussion, there was no way we could have gotten married in that day, and of course now he is not capable of doing any legal thing like getting married. His mind is incompetent. So we'll never do that."



Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post Cecil Bethea returns home on March 29 after spending the day with his partner, Carl Shepherd, in Denver, Colo. Cecil remembers that the couple had dated for 8 months, "and then Carl said let's get an apartment together, that was a romantic proposal." He compares the events to marriage, "We never had a ceremony or vows or anything, we just signed the lease, signing that lease was our marriage certificate I suppose. Then when we bought the house, we both signed on for that and a house does bring you close together, stretching out into the future."

Endurance brings its own romance. Staying the course can reflect tender tenacity. Long-lived marriages — institutionally sanctioned or not — retain a mystery, no matter how dissected, no matter how celebrated. Over the years — the decades — steady compatibility trumps volatile chemistry. Intimacy opts for more domestic rhythms. Longevity is in the details.

And so Bethea takes the bus to get from their increasingly untended house to nearby Juniper Village at The Spearly Center where he bathes and shaves his mate every other day. Then he grips the black rubber handles and wheels Shepherd out into the world.

It is what he does. He drives.

“We’ve been into every county of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and all but one in New Mexico,” says Bethea.

And if you want to know the cadence of their lives before illness and age changed the tempo, then those countless, restless, curious road trips speak of a romance neither man would ever claim for themselves.

Bethea has become the repository for their shared memories. His voice mixes the Southern lilt of Alabama and the thoughtful diction of a man who long ago mastered a slight speech impediment. (“As a child I could not pronounce ‘y,’ ” he says. “And life was full of little yellow chickens or little yellow dogs.”)

Their story began with a silly question. On that they agree. Where Shepherd posed that question however, they long ago agreed to disagree on. It was either Mary’s, a gay bar on Broadway. Or it was the Backdoor, another now-shuttered gay watering hole.

Bethea was sitting at the bar when the younger man asked him his question. It was no “what’s your sign?” brand of query. He asked him about a story that was generating local newspaper headlines.

“At that time there had been this financier in Boulder who was just going to buy up the world. He crashed and it was a big deal,” Bethea recounts. Carl sat down and, he says, “we got to talking.”

Later, Shepherd says about that night, “The others were so scraggly looking. He was the only one I wanted to talk to.” As he speaks, he rolls his wheelchair to and fro. The sounds of a ragtag music group plucking their way through “Country Roads” waft in from the nearby activity room.

They dated for nearly eight months. That December, Shepherd proposed that they move in together.

Early on, the duo figured out the rules of their domesticity. Bethea cooked and kept the accounts. The son of a plasterer, Shepherd was good with his hands: He can rebuild a car engine, and did. He made cabinets. He also crocheted scores of layettes for the infants of friends and family. “Carl is the smartest person I’ve ever known,” Bethea says.

Still, if one were going to pinpoint their shared passion, it would be the time they spent on the road.

Perhaps there is no more challenging place for a couple to learn a thing or two about themselves than the confined space of an automobile’s front seat. Mark Twain said it: “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”

“We agreed with the canard that getting there was half the fun,” Bethea recalls. “We were never the kind of people to drive 600 miles in a day.”

One cold, wind-buffeted trip to Mosquito Pass, the two stacked their luggage in the front seat of their station wagon and put a Coleman stove atop it. They kept warm. They read. They did crosswords. The wind blew and blew.

From Denver, it’s nearly 800 miles to Helena, approximately 1,300 to Birmingham. It was a blessing, says Bethea, to have such far-flung home towns.

“We often wondered if he’d been from Greeley and I’d been from Grand Junction how little of the country we would have seen.” Though their travels weren’t limited to family visits, they made the most of them, taking side trips. They’d go to Kansas City and take in the art museum. They’d stop in Paducah, Ky., where the National Quilt Museum resides. (Carl quilts.)

“We had the money, not much,” Bethea says. “But where we were really rich: We had the time.”

As they drove, Carl would often urge Cecil to stop.

“I remember we were down in Arizona, right along the border and he said ‘Let’s stop and look for cacti.’ We got out, went looking for cacti for about an hour.”

They’d stop in small towns, walk down the street and guess at what business an abandoned building once housed. “This building was the drugstore, we’d know that because it had these tiles on the floor. This one was a J.C. Penney. And we just had fun.”

During the many miles of traveling together as two men, Bethea recalls only one incident of concern. They were coming out of a bar in eastern Colorado (“a trip we thoroughly enjoyed”).

“When we left, I can’t remember what he said exactly, but a guy made a gay statement.” They didn’t break stride. “He just said something,” says Bethea making it clear it didn’t much rattle them.

Shepherd and Bethea met in April of 1969, two months before the Stonewall uprising in New York. That clash between denizens of a New York City gay bar and police has become the demarcation of the start of the modern gay-rights movement.

Bethea and Shepherd’s story seems to run parallel to that culture-altering movement.

While legions of young gay folk were re-creating their identities and lives apart from their homes, making exoduses to New York or San Francisco, Shepherd and Bethea were living in Denver, working at the May D&F department store and hitting those many roads, visiting each other’s families.

“I really felt accepted by his mother,” says Bethea. When Shepherd’s mother, Cecilia, died, the obit mentioned Bethea in the same fashion it had the husbands of Shepherd’s sisters. “Now his family did that. I thought about it later. I would never had noticed it had they left me out, but they included me.”

As for his family, Bethea said Shepherd won his way into his mother’s heart by plying his handyman skills. “I put new plumbing in his mother’s house,” confirms Shepherd, smiling broadly.

On Sunday when they ride in the Gay Pride parade, it will be only their second time in that parade together. Now they are elders, accidental role models, even.

“I think it was our 20th anniversary. We were in this gay restaurant,” Bethea says. “I never talked about how long we’d been together. But Carl always did. He mentioned to the waiter it was our 20th anniversary and the young man got excited and said, ‘What did you all do to last so long?’ I came up with my usual answer: Get old.”

That was more then two decades ago. Their journeys these days are circumscribed and a lot more arduous. The once-robust conversation has waned. And Bethea hopes a doctor OKs Shepherd for an electric wheelchair or scooter. He’s finally tiring of driving. “I just don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to push him around. “

Still, they endure.

Asked one afternoon, if they were a romantic couple, Shepherd replied “no,” with a smile.

He then added “People who were around us for any amount of time realize we’re together forever.”

Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567, lkennedy@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bylisakennedy