Looking for love in the Sunday newspaper

I love to read the Celebrations page in the Sunday newspaper. I’m a romantic at heart and I love the perfect young women in their incredible white wedding gowns as well as the imposed stuffiness and strain on the English language of sentences like:
The former Miss Jane Doe was begowned in a vintage fashion first worn by her maternal grandmother Winifred Rose Harthington nee Plunkett and crowned with a fingertip veil accented with mother of pearl.
This is all fascinating information for a writer and I put a whole story to it in my mind, Grandma Winny’s dress not being the bride’s first choice and the mother of pearl veil thrown in to sweeten the pot, so to speak, and ultimately being perfect.
I have a certain fascination with those weddings, where there is
great seriousness about the bride’s choice of lace and flowers. Where the fate of the world seems to hinge on the total unexceptability of tea length gowns. And theme colors can truly make or break the day.
Words of wisdom that I often share ad nauseam whenever an occasion arrives is that weddings and funerals are the most vulnerable times for families, the wrong words spoken will be remembered for a lifetime. For all the elegant centerpieces and tasteful tulle, the relationships at these events can be very sobering indeed.
The big white wedding never happened for me. My first husband and I married in the judge’s chambers on our lunch break.
The bride wore brown slacks and a brown and black print shirt that still hangs at the back of her closet somewhere.
Then, when I married Bill in 2001 I was a widow and a bit past the age when one could really carry off the great white dress and all that tulle. But I had a nice blue dress and a cute hat, a few friends and family and Mexican food. It was perfect for us.
Still, I love weddings and enjoy reading about them.
But it’s the other part of the Celebrations page that truly draws me in. The older couples with their landmark anniversaries, 50, 60 something even 70 years of married life. I love those announcements.
My mom’s parents made it past 60 years. My dad’s parents made it to 72 years. My parents were married for 57 years. That’s big.
From all directions we hear how few marriages actually make it, how hard it is to stick together and how nearly impossible it is for people remain in love for the long haul.
Some people say that couples don’t try hard enough. That they give up at the first sign of trouble. But that can’t be true. There are whole sections in bookstores about keeping marriages together. People buy those books! And they don’t buy them to sit on the coffee table for their friends to see.
I think most people who get married, whether in a fancy white dress or brown slacks, really really try to make it work. Sometimes it just can’t. One person may just completely go zonkers. Both people may drift apart. There can be unforeseen obstacles that make compromise impossible. Or day to day annoyances that just wear love out.
But oh, those that make it, they do make me smile. I especially love the wedding picture next to the current photo. It sort of a BEFORE and AFTER that implies: This is what 60 years of wedded bliss will do to you. (ha!)
The lists of children and grandchildren is an absolute requirement. I wondered for a while if couples without children didn’t live as long. But the real deal, I think, is that without children, nobody thinks to put your picture in the paper.
Occasionally the bride or groom will attempt to answer the secret of their years together. I always try to make note of what they say, because it’s important information you can’t get anywhere else.
Over the years I’ve been reading these, all advice boils down to two necessary requirements: A sense of humor. And mutual respect.
Maybe we should write those two traits on elegant white cards in fancy calligraphy and send them as wedding gifts. In the long run, they’ll do a lot more for the marriage than a blender.

Dinner Conversation

I’m supposed to be working, but I’m not. I’m sitting in front of my computer thinking about Jane Austen. I’m thinking about her wonderful characters, her brilliant style.
"Some books are so familiar reading them is like being home again."
That quote reminds me of Jane, but it’s not Jane’s quote. It’s Louisa May Alcott. Another of my heroes, or should I say heroines?
I have wondered upon occasion if Louisa May Alcott ever read Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice would have been about thirty years old when Alcott was a teenager. We know Louisa was an avid reader, but I’m not sure if she had time for novels. With Emerson living across the street and Thoreau down by the pond, one might have to expend considerable amounts of time on the classics just to keep up with the dinner conversation.
Wow! I like that image. I’m picturing my back deck, cooking a few chicken breasts or lamb chops on the grill as a couple of America’s greatest philosophers sip wine and share thoughts about transcendence or the natural law of compensation. Now that would be an interesting evening.
When we have friends come over, the conversation goes through all kinds of highs and lows. We talk about family, school, the price of gas, whether the Spurs can win the championship next year and what are we going to do about that woman down the street who walks her poodle into our yards to poop.
As the night gets later and the dishes are cleared off, the talk might drift into less mundane discussion. Is it right to push the homeless into certain neighborhoods? Should people who don’t recycle pay more for trash pick-up? If you can’t make a college education free, can we at least make it equitable?
Of course, none of us are great minds, or if we are no one yet knows. But then being a great mind is not usually something we know about people in their lifetimes. Sometimes we do. Leonardo DiVinci and Benjamin Franklin were famously brilliant and everybody knew it. Even Alcott, Emerson and Thoreau were well-known and respected in the time that they lived.
Jane Austen was not.
I was in England last year and did some Jane Austen travel, including the museum in Bath. I also visited Winchester Cathedral where she is buried. Her grave marker in the floor says something like: Jane Austen, beloved daughter and sister. On the wall nearby a plaque was put up, many years later, identifying her as THE Jane Austen, Authoress. She died before the true genius of her work was known. People undoubtedly talked to her at the fish mongers every Thursday with no clue that she was the greatest literary mind of her generation.
All my friends are smart, interesting people. They are all capable of what Jane might call "elevated conversation". I don’t know if our discussions are as interesting as those that took place in the dining room of Orchard House, but they are interesting to me.
I think I’ll go thaw out some chicken and get on the phone to see who’s up for some philosophy grilling.

I Brought My Heart Home from San Francisco

I’m back from my trip, tired, but rejuvenated as well. I like to travel, to see new things and interesting places. But it’s always good to come home to our little bungalow that’s comfortable and cozy and so suited to us.
San Francisco is a fabulous city, unique and cosmopolitan. The weather was cool and the sun shone. Who could argue with that?
I was there for a writer’s conference, so I signed a lot of books, talked to a lot of long time friends and had some great face-to-face meetings with my agent, my editor and people from my publisher.
Bill and I took as much time as we could to see the city. We tooled through Golden Gate Park in a three-wheel scooter. We ate a romantic lunch at the Cliff House. And we saw the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Art.
I enjoyed it all, but maybe my favorite day was visiting the giant redwoods in Muir Woods. It’s dark and cool and the sweet smell of the trees seems to permeate everything. We didn’t take the hardest trails, but we didn’t stay on the easiest either. We got far enough away from the crowds to hear the rustle of the leaves and the water rushing down the creek. It was nice.
Bill and I talked about how the trees got so big. He told me that the redwoods have an advantage over many other trees. When they are threatened by fire or storm damage or whatever, the tree’s response to that is to form a burl near the roots. From that burl a new shoot will grow out very quickly and being attached to the old tree’s root system, it can get big and strong and sturdy in a very short time. Sometimes the main tree survives and sometimes it does not. Either way, the new growth flourishes on the deep roots that were already put down.
Amazingly, the seeds of the redwood are equally unique. They lie dormant on the forest floor, sometimes for years. It’s only when fire sweeps through that they are activated to grow.
The panel I was on at the conference was about writing under pressure, writing when things go bad. I’ve certainly written books through some very tough times in my own life. And my fellow panel members had their share of adversity as well.
I guess the whole premise of such a discussion is that in times of tragedy, going on with our lives, doing our jobs and continuing to meet our obligations is somehow miraculous. It’s brave. It’s admirable.
Perhaps though, there is a way that the terrible things that happen to us can activate new growth. We can form attachments that tap into our roots or finally spur all that creativity that has lain fallow on the ground for so long.
It doesn’t make the bad times any easier to bear. But maybe it does give them some kind of purpose. That in itself can be enough to get us by.