An Occasion For A Few Romantic Thoughts

June 4th, 2011  |   

“There are only four questions of value in life, Don Octavio.  What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made?  What is worth living for, and what is worth dying for?  The answer to each is the same - only love.”   Johnny Depp:  Don Juan DeMarco

I am in a bit of a romantic mood so please bear with me. I promise not to get sappy.

You see, on June 14, Judy and I will celebrate our fifty-third wedding anniversary. With that in mind, I thought I’d use the occasion to share a few thoughts about love and marriage.

I’d like to share some personal thoughts about love and marriage while, also, addressing some social justice connections related to the subject. My focus, therefore, will not merely be on me and thee (Judy and me) be also on thee and we (our life together in community).

Out of concern for folks who are not married, single, divorced, or living with someone, either gay or straight, I promise to make the subject matter inclusive. If love is, like the song says, “a many-splendored thing,” then it seems obvious that love is experienced in a variety of ways by each and every one of us. With that in mind, I would welcome reader-response to what I am sending out in this issue of Notes.

One more comment before I set sail out onto the Sea of Love in the Love Boat.

You will note that I began this issue of Notes with a few lines from the movie “Don Juan DeMarco,” a film, by the way, I have not seen. I found it checking a host of romantic film clips. I discovered a trove of rich quotes about love that will serve as introductory pieces for each section of this issue.

Bon voyage!

*****

“When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”    Billy Crystal: When Harry Met Sally

Judy and I met on a blind date in September 1954. We were freshmen at nearby colleges in Virginia. Very strange circumstances surrounded that first date.

Two years prior to enrolling at Washington & Lee University, I accompanied a friend who was looking at the school. I just went along for the ride. While there, I met a guy named Jim Lewis. His date for the evening said that if I should enroll at W&L she would fix me up with a date.

You know how the story ends. I did go to W&L. She did fix me up with a date. It was Judy. Four years later, two weeks after graduation, we were married in her hometown, Batavia, New York.

I often wonder what would have happened if I had gone to Dartmouth, the Naval Academy or Johns Hopkins—schools I could have attended—or if Judy had chosen another school. I think not only of Judy but also our son and daughters—so many histories that would have been rewritten and remolded. There’s a profound conundrum beneath that thought. It has to do with free will and the murky subject of predestination. I leave it to my readers to figure it out.

Over the four years we dated, Judy and I got to know one another very well—as well as folks that age can know one another given the hormonal drive that found a nest in an energetic sexual drive. When the day came for us to stand before a minister in a church and confess that we didn’t know any reason why we should not be joined in holy matrimony, it certainly appeared that reasonable people were making a choice based on reasonable assumptions. I smile when I say that, because the commitment to spend our lives together was really an emotional decision—a leap of faith.  

Something emotional drove the two of us together “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish till death do us part.”

After 53 years of marriage, all I can possibly say is three cheers for the emotional power that lies behind all worthy commitments.

*****

“A heart can be broken; but it keeps beating just the same.” Jessica Tandy:  Fried Green Tomatoes

In the June 9 issue of The New York Review of Books, Russell Baker writes a review of two new books about Eleanor Roosevelt. It’s a marvelous piece in which he comments on Eleanor’s response to finding out that her husband was in love with Lucy Mercer, Eleanor’s young social secretary.

“Eleanor,” says Baker, “told her friend Joseph Lash that the discovery was devastating, that the bottom seemed to have dropped out of her life.”  But then he goes on to say: “Yet as her subsequent history persuasively testifies, it was also her liberating moment, a life-changing event that opened a world of glorious possibilities for a woman not too timid to explore them.”

One of life’s most mysterious paradoxes has to do with human fragility and strength. I have encountered it time and time again over the years.

On the one hand, human beings are fragile. They can be broken very easily. A few examples serve to illustrate my point.

I think of a woman who was married for just a few months and was so broken by whatever she experienced in that brief period of time that she returned to her parents home, lived there for the remainder of her life, and never dated another man.   

Then there are the various young people we have seen in the news recently who committed suicide because of the bullying and harassment they had to endure at school and on the Internet.

I think most of us, if not all of us, can identify those moments in our lives when we have had to bump into our own fragility. How easily lives can be broken.

Having said that—and here’s the paradox—human beings are strong beyond belief.

In the news today is the story of Jaycee Dugard who was kidnapped when she was eleven years old and held as a sex slave for 18 years. Raped again and again, she gave birth to two daughters. One would think she would never recover from this ordeal but, by her own confession, she is doing well surrounded by loving parents and friends.

I think of the casualties of war who return home maimed and pulverized—brain damaged and missing limbs—who somehow defy the odds by bouncing back by getting on with their lives.

Eleanor Roosevelt lived through her devastating marital experience. Not only did she live through it, she lived beyond it by being engaged with bold humanitarian and civil rights work. She was, and continues to be, an example for women and men alike, of the resiliency and incredible strength of human beings who have descended into hell only to ascend to a position of strength. I think of Hillary Clinton and the women I have known over the years who not only survived a bad marriage and a divorce and yet have come out of it stronger on the other side.

*****

“Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”  John Hurt: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

The May 29 New York Times Magazine cover story featured Tatiana and Krista Hogan, 4-year-old twin girls who are joined at the head. The pictures of these little girls are astonishing once the shock of seeing them subsides. Without going into the full story, it’s enough to say that they are happy, bright children.

One of the things that intrigued me was the description of how their separate brains appear to have an attenuated line stretching between the two organs.  A neurosurgeon calls it a thalamic bridge that links the thalamus of one girl to another. This link may be the connecting tissue that allows one child to taste and feel what the other child tastes and feels.

Empathy is defined as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” I believe this is one of the premier emotional attributes that define human beings at their very best.  

I will confess to my readers that when Judy shows me her skinned shins—the seemingly vulnerable part of her body—I get a queasy feeling at the base of my stomach. Or, when she is happy or sad, I feel her energy or lack of it. It’s as if, like the Hogan twins, a thalamic bridge is crossed.

I love the imagery from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin that depicts roots from two trees that grow together. Two trees, with different bark, branches and leaves that become one without losing their own identity, pretty well defines the connectedness that Judy and I have grown into over the years.

*****

“Kiss me. Kiss me as if it were the last time.”   Ingrid Bergman: Casablanca

We have all, thank God, lived through the prediction that Jesus was coming back to announce the apocryphal day when history would come to end and believers would be raptured to heaven and unbelievers left behind in a hell-of-a-mess.

This prediction is not a new one. Religious prognosticators have predicted the end of the world for centuries. Just two decades after the Civil War, a church pastor told his congregation to make special ascension robes to be worn after they quit their jobs and went to the country to wait for the arrival of Jesus. Without Mapquest or a GPS device, I might, have worried about Jesus being able to find all those good people.

I was in Berryville, Virginia, on May 21, the day the rapture was to have occurred. I was preparing for a wedding scheduled for the next day. Lots of jokes circulated when the day passed and we were all still there and the wedding could go off as planned.

Here’s an interesting tidbit. Comedian Nicey Nash tweeted a joke on May 20th about her May 29th wedding: “If the world ends tomorrow at 6pm, I can end my wedding stress eloping! If I’m alive at 6:01pm, the stress continues.” As John Travolta says in the movie Michael, “You got to learn to laugh, it’s the way to true love.”

After the end-of-the-world prediction failed and the laughter died down, I had a serious thought. Perhaps it would be a good thing if each and every one of us would approach every day of our lives as if it were the last day. Thee last time to make peace with the present and abandon anxieties about the future. The last day to seek and serve Jesus in one’s self and in other people. The last time to tell family and friends that we love them.

And, as Ingrid said, kiss my beloved as if it were the last time.

*****

“As a nation, we began by declaring that “All men are created equal.” We now practically read it, “All men are created equal, except Negroes.” Soon, it will read “All men are created equal, except Negroes, and Foreigners and Catholics.” When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty. To Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”   Sam Waterston: Lincoln’s words in Ken Burn’s The Civil War

Judy and I are preparing for a five-day 150 year anniversary Civil War summer course by reading “1861: The Civil War Awakening” by Adam Goodheart. I highly recommend this book. It depicts lesser-known characters in the battle against slavery. 

Abby Kelly is one of those characters. An American abolitionist and women’s suffragist, she preached the truth without fear. “Washington and Jefferson were slave holding thieves, living by the unpaid labor of robbed women and children.” Crowds called her a Jezebel, a witch, a nigger bitch, a “man woman” but it didn’t faze her in the least.

Kelley founding a new weekly paper, the Anti-Slavery Bugle with a masthead that read “I love agitation when there is a cause for it.” And never once did she ever waver from calling the wrath of God down on slaveholders. Once she even stormed a train and kidnapped a black child on her way to slavery. Bringing the liberated child to the stage, she bestowed a new name on her—Abby Kelley Salem.

One hundred and fifty years later, I long for that Sister Kelley’s message that would replace the sappy spirituality that seeps from so many church pulpits these days.

*****

“Happiness is only real when shared.”   Emile Hirsch: Into The Wild

As complicated and as messy as family life can be at times, it must be said that it is our first experience of the world outside our individual self. We did not ask to be born, nor did we choose our parents or siblings. It is our initial encounter of community—the place where we have to deal with the joys and conflicts of an immediate family. Whatever training we get in that setting, prepares us for the larger community we grow into as adults.

Choosing a partner, whether in marriage or outside marriage—no matter what our sexual orientation might be—is a similar experience centered around negotiating a relationship with another human being, and with children, if they enter the picture. It is a broadening experience. For me, growing up in a family without sisters, living with Judy and three daughters helped me grow into a better understanding of women. Having a son was an expansion of my dealings with a father and a brother.

What this boils down to is the fact that human beings in a family setting, and then later in an extended community outside of family, have to learn how to deal with what we might call the “other.” The experience of others—people who are different from us—tests not only our tolerance but also our ability to accept and learn from people who are not like us. When this does not happen, destructive and prejudicial myths about people foster prejudice and even the persecution of others.

At this particular moment in our nation, immigrants, Muslims, and gays are the others who are testing our nation’s capacity for justice. Dogmatic racial, religious and political posturing is shaping our laws and reinforcing our moral self-righteousness.

The unwillingness of politicians to grant full marital rights to gays, and the religious dogma that gives moral justification for this legal lethargy, undermines our nation’s long journey toward equal rights for all people. This can be observed in the statement from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in their statement about gay marriage.

“We oppose attempts to grant the legal status of marriage to a relationship between persons of the same sex. No same-sex union can realize the unique and full potential, which the marital relationship expresses. For this reason, our opposition to “same-sex marriage” is not an instance of unjust discrimination or animosity toward homosexual persons”

Think of it, Catholics, once identified by Lincoln with “Negroes and Foreigners” as outsiders denied equal rights, now denying gay people their rights. I believe that Abby Kelley, if she were to preach today, would call that statement blasphemous.

 

Entry Filed under: Fig Tree Notes Archives

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