So sorry but not surprised to hear about the Kardashian-Humphries split and the demise of the Katy Perry-Russell Brand nuptials. In an age where marriage and relationships come and go faster than a drunken athlete’s Tweets, none of us should be surprised.
We have been living in a disposable world for quite some time. Not quite sure when it began but I suspect it made its arrival about the time disposable diapers and razors came onto the scene.
Any more, if the Internet service you have runs too slow and it’s hard to get a wireless connection, just get rid of what you have and upgrade. All that cheesy and intriguing stuff offered in television ads (why do most of these items usually only cost $19.95, plus shipping and handling?) that breaks down fast, we soon discard or “re-gift” to the less fortunate. Get rid of it.
It’s an odd and ironic phenomenon, especially when you consider there are a few among us who hoard monstrous tons of garbage, flea-bitten starving colonies of animals and stuff which places them at point of eviction and alienation from their families. And even worse, makes them subjects of reality series.
But I am getting off message, perhaps. I was talking about relationships; more specifically, marriage and its all-too-common disposability. Far be it for me to offer any profound observations on the subject, having been up the proverbial aisle more than once. However, I won’t let that stop me.
There was a couple I befriended at the church I joined two decades ago. When I first met him, he already was hobbled by age and infirmity, but he continued to sing in the church choir, something he had done for nearly eight decades. He might have been stooped when standing, but he always looked into your eyes when you conversed and was quick with a quip. She, too, was fragile, always nicely coiffed and dressed precisely, and wore a smile and whispered a kind word which could dim the darkest of blues in our sanctuary.
I often wondered what trials, tribulations and triumphs they had faced as a couple over the seven decades of their marriage. So many things occurring in the big world– much less in the little world they had created and built on Indianapolis’ south side. They were feeble on the outside, but they were cement in every other sense.
What I always admired most was the way they would walk into the church together, always hand-in-hand or arm-in-arm. I suspect it was not out of a sense of old-fashsioned decorum or marital duty; rather, fueled by an uncommonly common love for one another.
Touch: emotional, physical and a spiritual accord. It is always so fundamentally essential from the time we draw our first breath until our last. But there was something more.
The same kind of magic which made Mother Teresa the giant she was with those she served. And a deep attitude and a thousand other things like tolerance, forgiveness, support and genuine friendship. And always – always – love. Those are among the things I believe which cemented the bonds between those two people I was fortunate to know.
In his funny yet caustic short story, The Diary of Adam and Eve, Mark Twain takes us to a final scene where the world’s first man is standing at the grave of the world’s first woman. His wife, though they had didn’t have the proper paperwork to show it. He remembers her youth, her charm, her idiosyncrasies and foibles. What they forged in their long lives together. Adam wraps it all up by touchingly note what I consider to be the most romantic expression of marriage and love.
Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.
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