ALTAMONT — Nils Mockler is 80 years old. He fought in the second World War. He organized a union. He got married this month.

He in a fedora and she with flapper’s pearls, Mary Karen Burke and Nils Edward Mockler were wed at the Altamont Manor on Oct. 8.
At 68, Mockler said, with a wink, his bride is "just a child." A poet from Westchester County, Burke wrote of their engagement, "The night was August warm, moon bright and still, and you knelt — no one had done that before — and asked the question."
"I had not planned it at all," said Mockler. He bent his knee in the parking lot of his synagogue, wearing dry-clean-only pants.
The bride’s poem goes on: "‘Yes. Yes, I will marry you.’ An expression held your face hostage – so disbelieving, I sought to set you free. I said, ‘It’s Ok. You can take it back.’ While in my belly, fire turned to cold ash."
Mockler was surprised by her answer and remembered saying, "Holy shit."
"You became twelve again," the poem says, "sixty years shed in an instant, as you stuttered, ‘No, no, I don’t take it back."
Mockler, a long-time Altamont resident who taught carpentry for most of his career, praised his bride’s poetry in earnest: "These young 40-, 50-, 60- somethings were impressed," he said.
The Catholic bride and Jewish groom were wed by the town clerk; having a priest and a rabbi would have been too much, Mockler said. "Just being male and female is difficult enough," he said.
The newlyweds haven’t yet settled on where they’ll live as a married couple. "Come April," when they return from their honeymoon, said Mockler, "we’ll have to decide." Traveling from Venice to Greece, they’re getting "the honeymoon at the senior rate," said Mockler.
"I used to think that 60 would be the end of everything," he said. "But it’s not."