The lovely bride is in Texas today, with our son John, so I thought I would tell you a story.
It’s a pretty common story. It’s the story available to each one of us, whether we are rich or poor, whatever our color, and whatever our hearts may demand of us.
It’s the smallest story someone can tell us, and the biggest one we’ll ever live through.
It is, of course, a love story.
And I grant she’d tell it differently than I do. We are all, each one of us, the only true witnesses to anything.
But here’s what I remember of it.
My first season with Jenni was the fall of 1975. There was a coda beforehand, a few weeks which became famous in the lore of our college, but I’ve told that one too many times and it’s not really useful.
My first sight of her was from the back of the basement where the marching band practiced music. I was at my usual position, among the snare drums. She was one of the newcomers to the flute section.
She was short, she wore thin cotton trousers and a light top in the summer heat. She had a round face, real hips, and Coke bottle glasses, behind which shone the bluest eyes I’d ever seen, a blue lighter than the sky.
I was instantly smitten, and it was a great surprise to learn she felt the same way about me. The night she admitted this, several weeks later, was the happiest day in my life.
I remember like it was yesterday. It was late at night. I was walking from her dorm to my own room, on the other side of campus, past the statue of the University’s founder, in the main quad. I remember feeling this enormous sense of peace, and joy, which surged through my chest and out through my fingers. And I remember talking to myself, about what a friend she was, and how friendly I felt. Not love, not sex, friendship. Along with a commitment not to let that feeling go.
Friendship and commitment. If you want to assure a happy marriage, these are the only ingredients you need. The first is easily given, the second commonly misunderstood. There are no guarantees here, no assurances. One person, no matter how committed, can’t make a marriage work, so I hold no brief against divorce. A one-sided commitment is always abuse. I know this for a fact.
My feelings have not changed. Neither, amazingly, have hers. No matter the season. And so those seasons have passed, one by one.
There were seasons when her parents tried to get rid of me, seasons when I felt I might lose her, seasons when we fought and seasons of turmoil where life made the decisions for us.
There were seasons of want, and the season when I realized her parents had finally accepted me, when they presented us the down payment for the home we have today.
There came more seasons. The first seasons with our daughter, the first with our son. Seasons of prosperity, and seasons of worry.
There were seasons spent in therapy, many such seasons, because no one marries just one person, but everyone else who has ever touched them – parents, siblings, the strangers who hurt them, all the unseen forces of the soul which are easy to keep hidden from all but your beloved, along with more secrets hidden in your genes.
I learned then about ADD, and she learned that it doesn’t respond to typical talk therapy. There was a horrible, terrifying season in the middle of all this when she did threaten to leave, and I became horribly sick, a physical wreck, with a pounding headache and some difficulty in breathing. But help was on the way.
More seasons passed. These were seasons of the children, of their trips and their problems, all the land mines waiting for some other lucky man and woman, down the road. We did the best we could, but there is no perfect parenting, and no perfect childhood. There is just getting by, getting through, doing your best, accepting the pain and the people who gave it. All kinds of lessons, all kinds of wounds.
Somehow, by some miracle, and despite more seasons of financial hurt, at least for me, we arrived at the current season. It’s a season of love, not just between us but among us, the kids grown enough now to forgive us our trespasses, willing to sit around a table for an hour at a time, swapping stories over dinner, laughing, happy.
God grant us many more seasons. How many is not for us to know. That’s what Jenni’s trip is about. That’s why she’s not here.
Jenni’s parents have had 67 years of marriage. We’d go out there around our own anniversaries and get treated like pikers – 22, 25, 28 years? That’s nothing. Piffle. Why my cousin will celebrate her 70th anniversary next spring (and so she did).
Theirs has been a glorious marriage, a wonderful life together. Within the community he is well known, and well loved, for the hard work he did with other peoples’ children. The one time he lost his job it was front page news, and he had another one within a few months, just a few miles away from the first.
I go there for Christmas and when it gets out who her father is the stories come out, from waiters, or clerks, or just strangers on the street, of what he did for them, of what they did together. There are great-grandchildren now, and a home upon a hill, there is financial security, there is the love of a gracious God.
But bodies give out. We all face the end, in time. This may be their last season. We pray not, but fear yes. In retirement my father-in-law wrote his own autobiography. He titled it, “Never Alone.” He isn’t.
So it’s a quiet weekend, spent apart. I think back, and think ahead. I see this immense distance stretching behind me, so many seasons of love, well over 100 now, and I wonder what else might happen?
Then I remember, that at this point in my in-laws’ marriage, there was still ahead, far ahead, a day when their youngest girl, the love of their life, would come home with this scraggly, bearded, ridiculous young man. They would loathe him and fear him. What could he offer?
Only friendship and commitment, the same gifts they offered one another so long ago.
That is enough.
