Ash Wednesday New Year's Week

This week has been up and down for me, as the first week of January often is.  I feel the sadness of the holidays leaving us, along with the sadness of the zooming of the years.  It's an Ash Wednesday kind of mood:  we are dust and to dust we shall return, and faster than many of us are aware.

I no longer castigate myself for all I have not accomplished.  Making it through the day to day grinding aspects of the past 2 years has seemed accomplishment enough:  the larger perilous times we seem to have tumbled into, coupled with hurricane repairs, and some family health issues.

So, let me make a list, as I often do on one of the week-end days, of moments of the week that I want to capture:

--Last night I went out to socialize with a group from work.  I think it's the first time that I've done that in this new job, which is no longer a new job, since I've had it for 2 years.  We went out to celebrate one of our colleagues who is moving to the Ft. Lauderdale campus.  It was very pleasant, which doesn't surprise me.  My campus colleagues are very pleasant, which is a good thing, since we spend so much time together.

--I got home to find my spouse in the process of killing a roof rat that had gotten in the house.  Yes, we have a house that is more sealed up than it ever has been, and this is the time we get a rat in the house?  Insert a heavy sigh here.

--I think of all those pop songs where a lover declares something along the lines of "I would catch a grenade for you"--that's all well and good, but would you do the dishes for me?  Would you vacuum so that I didn't have to do it?  Last night--would you kill a rat in the house for me?  My spouse did.  And he cleaned up the mess from having to do it.

--I have a variety of ways that I evaluate humanity.  Last night was a shining moment for my spouse.  I have no idea what I'd have done if he hadn't been here to take care of it--leave the house and spend the night with a friend?  He showed me how to work the pellet gun, but I'm pretty sure I'm not a good enough shot to hit a small critter.

--After the rat killing we transformed the Christmas wreath:

Now it's a Valentine's wreath:

--It's been a week where I've seen more friends than usual.  That's both a plus and a minus.  It's great to catch up, of course.  It makes me sad to see/feel how far flung we all are, even though we still live in the same county.  It was much easier to maintain that closeness when we all worked at the same school, where we could eat our lunches together or take time for a cup of tea or coffee.

--My new approach to weekly goals (see this blog post for details) is working well. Hurrah!  I have written 2 new poems and sent out two packets--that might not seem significant, but those weekly goals were on my list, and I did them.  Having the log/list above my writing desk helps me stay focused each day.

--I am participating in this month's spin class challenge--the one who attends the most classes gets a free spot in the Feb. spinathon.  I have a real shot at winning, so I'm going to press that advantage now, before the traveling that comes later in the month takes over.  After the eating galas of December, I can use the opportunity to burn some extra calories.  I've only gained a pound or 2, but I need to reverse that trend.

--I've been exhilarated by all of the pictures of the women House members arriving and taking oaths and holding children and comforting each other.  We've got considerably more women now than when Nancy Pelosi was last Speaker of the House (same number of women in the Senate, however).  We still don't have parity.  But we have a transgender member now, and a bisexual member.  Those firsts feel VERY important to me.  I know that previously marginalized populations bring a very important perspective when they gain some power--it doesn't always work out perfectly, but it helps society lurch towards the arcing of history towards justice that MLK talked about.

Of Poet Laureates and Poetry Progress

I am just seeing the announcements that Tracy K. Smith will be our new poet laureate.  I am so in awe of her work and so intrigued to see how she will use the power of that office.

In the interest of honesty, let me also observe that this news makes me feel inadequate.  She's 45, the winner of many prizes, the head of Creative Writing at Princeton.  I am a woman who will be 52 one month from today, and my publication roster is smaller.  I cannot imagine that I will ever be invited to work at one of our nation's more prestigious universities; but I also know that if I did work there, I'd be worried about the nation's dispossessed who aren't being served by those universities.  I am working with those populations, and I confess that I am no miracle worker.

I was thinking about the paths my life has followed as I drove up Highway 17 towards Charleston. I don't usually take that route, but I was meeting my Mepkin friends for lunch in Mt. Pleasant before we went on to the Abbey.  I thought about some of the past times I've travelled that road, both when we lived there and when we came back.  I thought about the time that I read at the Piccolo Spoleto festival, which felt like a highwater mark of my career.  I had one chapbook published, which meant that I could read at the event.  I felt sure that I'd have a book with a spine soon--and surely, I could than translate that success into a different kind of teaching job--I wasn't naïve enough to think it would be a Princeton kind of job, but perhaps a liberal arts school or a smaller state school.

That was back in 2005, and while career/artistic doors have opened to me, they haven't been the ones I expected.

I feel fortunate to have had friends along the way, and our stories are similar.  I think of good news that came to them, good news that I thought might be transformative--and yet, the paths that came afterwards aren't the ones we expected.  Perhaps our new poet laureate has similar stories.

I'm also struck by the fact that I read at Piccolo Spoleto in June of 2005.  I think of 2005 as one of my worst years, bookended by the horrible, drawn out, death-by-hospital of my mother-in-law and the worst hurricane season in Broward county in almost 100 years.  But it was also a year of creative success, and the year I returned to France (where I was born on an Air Force Base) with my parents--it was a trip that I knew would be one of my favorite memories, even as we were making those memories.

I feel like I've taken a bit of a sabbatical from good writing practices--in the past two months, with the accreditation visit and the follow up, with the intense pace of my ENC1102 online class, I haven't returned to my writing desk as often as I would like.  Let me now begin to plan for the bit of time that I see on the horizon, where the pace of my various work lives lightens a bit.

Living to the Age of 100

Today is an interesting juxtaposition of anniversaries.  It's the 100th birthday of Beverly Cleary, who is still alive and doing well.  For more on her history, see this article.  I am fascinated by the fact that she was one of the first writers who explored the regular lives of ordinary children.

When I was young, Beverly Cleary was one of my FAVORITE writers, along with Laura Ingalls Wilder and whoever was writing the Trixie Beldon series at the time.  I loved Beverly Cleary long before I loved Judy Blume.  And even now, I have a fondness for those Cleary characters that I don't necessarily have for the Blume characters.  That mouse on the toy motorcycle who lives in a hotel!  Ramona, who has the normal problems of childhood (being the youngest, oh, how unfair!), not the scoliosis and larger social problems of the Judy Blume novels.
I'm also grateful to her for exploring ordinary lives and showing that they matter too.  She opened the door to all of us who want to do the same:  to explore the ordinary and through that exploration, to show the universal.

My mother-in-law would not live 100 years.  She died on this day in 2005, after a long and difficult several months of medical spiraling, down and down, after a broken hip at the end of 2004.  Every time I thought her ordeal couldn't get any worse, it did.  I have always been phobic of doctors and hospitals, since childhood when a shot went wrong with a broken needle (my mother tells me; mercifully, I have no memory).  Her experience did not convince me that my fears are misplaced--just the opposite.

It's sobering to realize how many deaths begin in a fall and a hip break.  One of my mother-in-law's doctors said, "We come into the world through the birth canal, and we often leave it through the femoral neck."  It's those hips that hold us when we're in the womb, but it's those same hips that leave us vulnerable as older people.  Half the people who have a hip break will be dead a year later--and those who survive don't face good odds for survival in the next 5 years.

It's that knowledge that gets me to the gym multiple times a week.  I no longer hope for a dress size in the single digits.  No, I want to improve upon my flexibility and strength.  I want to strengthen my muscles, including that all important heart muscle.  Happily, through this training process, I am more likely to find success in those areas than I was likely to find success in shrinking myself into a single digit dress size.

I have known too many people, including my mother-in-law, who assumed that they would die long before the age of 100 because their parents had died at a relatively young age.  And then they are surprised to find out that they aren't dead.  I've also known too many people who have bad habits that ensure that they will die well before the age of 100.

I want Beverly Cleary's old age, where she only suffers a bit of arthritis and no other health issues.  I don't want the old age that so many of us seem doomed to suffer.

I am also aware of the futility of trying to avoid death.  We must live with the knowledge of impending obliteration, while also trying to age with grace and find comfort in the face of certain doom.

I have some recent publications that deal with these juxtapositions.  The "Lucky Charms" section of Escape into Life has 2 of my poems that show some coping methods, and yesterday, my poem  "Season of Ash and Penitence" was published here on the Hawai'i Pacific Review site.  That poem moves through Ash Wednesday as it looks at the ways we deal with the knowledge of our mortality.

On this day of interesting anniversary juxtapositions, let me close on a happy-ish note.  Here's the last line of "Praying the Breviary at 30,000 Feet," found in the "Lucky Charms" section of Escape into Life:

I pray the ancient patterns,
perceptions shifting like the view.
I let the language form
my mind into a calmer landscape.

Love Wins, and History Marches On

It has been an interesting week in terms of social justice progress.  Even as I have marched through a very tiring week, I've taken moments to let myself feel awe at the news I've been hearing.

The event that most of the nation and future historians will remember from this week will be yesterday's ruling on gay marriage.  I listened to this story on NPR yesterday about the man who wrote a paper as a law student arguing for the rights of gay people to marry; he wrote it in 1983, and he's spent the time between then and now working on that goal.  I thought about how few of us see our goals and visions so thoroughly accepted.  He will go to his grave knowing he's been a success in what he set out to do.

The conversation covered the idea of whether or not this change has come quickly or slowly.  He said that his younger colleagues want to change the world and they get discouraged at how long it might take.  But here we are, in quite a different landscape than the world we inhabited in 1983.

I think of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's.  I used to think of it as a social movement of the 1960's, but my college teachers explained how much groundwork had been laid in the 1940's, 50's and earlier.

Both of these social justice movements show that the changes seem like they're happening very quickly, but what often happens quickly is laid on a bedrock of thousands of acts of smaller resistance and consciousness changing and tinier legislative wins than the ones that were sought.  And then, at some point, boom--it seems as if the whole nation decides to change, all at once.

I'm also thinking of the issue of the Confederate flag.  I lived in South Carolina for many years, and I have heard various sides of the arguments around the flag.  I remember after a week or two at my small college in a small South Carolina town and thinking, some people here act like the Civil War was fought last year, not 120 years ago.  That wound seemed so fresh.

I was surprised when South Carolina moved the flag from the State House (or was the state ordered to do it?  how can I not remember?).  There was the compromise that it could stay on the grounds in an area that celebrates the Civil War.

I remember walking to the State House grounds during grad school.  I loved the statue that celebrated the courage of Civil War women--it was a statue of a woman struggling to lean forward to protect the children in her skirts.  I would touch the statue and wish for similar courage.  I would scold myself:  "You think grad school is so tough; it's nothing like the Civil War."  Something about that statue steadied me.

But I digress.  In short, I thought nothing would change people's minds about that flag--and for some people, this is true.  But the shooting in Charleston may have propelled the flag off the grounds altogether.  We shall see.

We also had Supreme Court decisions on health care and fair housing.  It's been a fascinating time to watch the Court.  My spouse keeps saying that the decisions are less interesting than the fact that it is this court that made those decisions.

Early this morning, I went to the grocery store to help my friend who has had hand surgery with her groceries.  I bought some groceries too.  I put my cantaloupe on the conveyer belt.  I thought of my mother's quip whenever she cut up a cantaloupe:  "Cantaloupe without a man!"

But now we can. 

I wish I had a more satisfactory conclusion--but I suspect the coming weeks/months/years will be like this:  small moments when we realize what a different world we're leaving for our children.  Some of the changes I like, while others make me mourn. 

I think of a law student working on a paper, someone we haven't heard of, don't expect to hear from--how will the world be changed by ideas that are only being formed today?

A Book Reception on a Rainy Night

One of the joys of my life as an administrator involves organizing celebrations.  You might think that perhaps I missed my calling as an event planner.  I assure you that's not the case.  I'm not the person who remembers that we need tablecloths, for example. 

But I do understand the importance of celebrating our victories.  And the victories that are most important to me are the ones that involve our creativity.

When I found out that one of my colleague friends had a 3rd edition of her book coming out, I asked when the book signing would be.  She shrugged and said, "Who would care?"

Well, as she did the revisions, I'd heard about the work it takes to update an edition.  It's not quite the same as writing the original book, bringing it into existence where nothing had been before.  But it's still a year-long labor deserving of celebration.

I asked our dean if we had a bit of money in the budget for a reception.  Happily, we can still afford a reception on a small scale:  a cake, some coffee, a veggie tray, a fruit tray.  We have a nice space in our small gallery.  So, we picked a date and ordered the food and waited to celebrate the new book.

Yesterday turned surprisingly rainy, so we weren't sure what to expect.  I thought we might be taking lots of cake home.  But happily, many people came by.  And it wasn't only faculty.  We had a few students--and lots of Admissions folks.

I talked to one of them for some time.  She wants to write a book, but she can't imagine having time.  We talked about ways to carve out time.  I could see the yearning in her face.  I hope she starts that book this week-end.  I plan to ask her about it the next time I see her.

I love being surrounded by people who are hard at work on their books.  My colleague whose book we celebrated last night has a deadline for a new textbook.  Another colleague wrote and illustrated a children's picture book that she's now revising--with a dog in a wheelchair in the new edition!  Another writer/colleague/friend made it through the rain, and we talked about her book of short stories based on Hindu religion and mythology.  I talked a bit about my memoir project. 

I was struck by how many of us get up early in the morning to write.  As the children's book writer and illustrator left to make her way home in the rain, I said, "I'll be raising my coffee cup to you in the morning."

And I am.   

Autumn Treats

--The Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced this morning, maybe while I'm writing this blog post.  Every year, I hold out hope for Margaret Atwood, whose breadth, depth, and incredible range amaze me.  Almost every year, a writer I've never heard of is announced.  Some of them, like Wislawa Szymborska, become my favorites.  But honestly, life is short, and many Nobel Laureates will not be read by me.  And from what I can tell, most of them don't have the talent of Atwood; certainly they do not have the range, the skill across multiple genres.  But I am biased.

--I am back to working on my memoir. That feels really good. 

--Yesterday, I spent part of the morning weaving together several Valentine's blog posts into a cohesive, coherent essay for the memoir.  And then, my spouse was quite grumpy because of home repairs.  I was tempted to go to work early and leave him to stew in his unpleasant juices.  But I remembered my very own words that I'd been weaving, and I forgave him and helped with the home repair project.  I wrote more extensively about this encounter in today's post on my theology blog, a blog post which ends with a love note for the ages preserved in concrete.

--I was talking to my artist/librarian friend about my memoir, and she asked if I was also coming at the subject matter from a woman's perspective.  I felt a brief stab of accusation from my younger self.  While I am coming at it from a female perspective, in that I am a female, I feel that I have less of those issues than other women.

--I feel that way because I have no children.  At the women's retreat I attended recently, I was the only woman with no children except for the few 18-20 year olds who were there.  While we have all wrestled with issues of having enough time and division of chores both on the job and at home, I have less of those struggles because I don't have demands that children bring.

--Still, it was a good reminder to be on the lookout for ways to bring the feminist issues to the fore.

--I need to get more poetry writing back into my days.  I found a scrap of paper in the car.  I had jotted poetry lines on it several weeks ago, but I'd done nothing more.  I'd like to get back to writing a poem a week.

--Breaking news:  the Nobel goes to Alice Munro.  Not the Canadian female writer for whom I was rooting.  But I do love Alice Munro too.  I'm happy at any time a female writer wins these prizes.

--My admittedly biased self feels that Margaret Atwood has a wider range of skills than Alice Munro.  But my happy writer self feels that no one has more skill with the short story than Munro.  And she has done so much to depict the lives of girls and women, to use a title of one of her books.

--I love that a short story writer has won the Nobel.  I can read a story of hers today for a treat without a huge time commitment.  She writes in my language; I don't have to wait for a translation.  She is part of a pantheon of writers who have been very important to me as a writer, especially as a female writer.  Hurrah!

--Other treats:  I have gingerbread baking in the oven.  It's perfuming the house with the scent of autumn.  I bought a bag of apples yesterday.  And this week-end I will help with the pumpkin offload at my church, and then I'll buy some pumpkins.  We'll see how long they last in this heat.

The Work of Immigrants: Richard Blanco and the Rest of Us

Yesterday, I heard that Richard Blanco had been selected to be the poet for Obama's inauguration.  I thought, that name is familiar.  I knew our paths had crossed somewhere down here in South Florida but where?

In the fall of 2007 (or was it 2008?), Florida International University offered a workshop with Blanco that was open to the community if we paid $50; I assume that MFA students could attend for free.  Back in those days, my school had money for professional development, and so, my poet friend and I went to the north campus of FIU, where the creative writing program is housed.

This morning, I looked through some folders, but I have nothing left from that workshop, even though I remember that Blanco gave us handouts.  My memory, which may be faulty, is that the workshop was to be about how to put together a book-length manuscript.  I remember Blanco talking about poetry presses that publish books, about contests, but I don't remember concrete advice.

I vaguely remember that we were supposed to bring our own poems.  Did we do any workshopping of poems?  Workshopping of poems would not have been as interesting to me as getting insight about book-length collections.  I remember a fierce conversation about the use of fairy tales in poetry--was it in response to my friend's Sleeping Beauty poem?  I'm fairly sure that we each brought a poem.  I don't remember the poem that I brought, and I don't remember anyone's responses.

I remember my friend and I leaving the workshop and driving north; I remember us being a bit shaken by the assertions by a young, female graduate student who was very derisive and dismissive of the use of fairy tales and feminist themes.

I remember that the workshop attendees were an even mix of grad students and those of us teaching college classes in community colleges and for-profit schools (my friend and me and maybe one other person).  I remember being impressed by the optimism of the grad students who assumed that the world would notice every poem that they wrote.

Richard Blanco was a graduate of the MFA program at FIU, and it was not lost on me that his work life at the time came about because of his engineering degree.  I think it may have been lost on the graduate students, although I suspect they've learned that life lesson by now.  Poetry is wonderful, but it rarely feeds the bulldog.

I remember being impressed with Blanco's ability to speak to all of us in the audience.  Some people competed for his attention, but he was good at making sure that everyone had a chance to participate.

My overall impression was of kindness and encouragement from Blanco and from most of the workshop participants.  I remember being impressed with Blanco's work.

But most of all, I remember feeling a sense of wonder that I had come to be at that place, in that time, surrounded by so much diversity.  In some ways, I remember that late afternoon workshop as a tale of multiple immigrants.  There was my friend who immigrated from India and her poems that are so deeply entwined with both western and eastern mythology and fairy tales.  And then there was Richard Blanco and his biography that is so much an archetypal story of the Cuban diaspora.  There were the grad students, immigrants of a different sort, who would soon be leaving on new immigrations of their own.

And then there was me, also an immigrant of yet a different sort, a monolingual woman who left the U.S. South behind to come to a part of the country that is so much a part of a different South, whose work has been informed so richly by all of those juxtapositions.

Writing About September 11

I haven't written a lot about September 11, at least not much in my poetry and fiction.  I can think of about 3 poems of mine that reference September 11.  It was only in the past 6 months that I've done much with Sept. 11 in my fiction.

I'm writing a series of linked short stories, and they often go in directions I don't expect.  I thought I was going to write a story about a woman at midlife who was having an unusual midlife crisis:  "I felt my midlife crisis nibbling at the edge of my day, but it wasn’t the midlife crisis I’d been trained to expect.  I loved my husband, loved my daughters, loved our home life.  My job as an HR expert wasn’t thrilling, but I did it well, and I’d been around enough HR departments to realize that few people did HR work well.  What was making me feel vaguely edgy and dissatisfied as I watched Adam and my daughters work at learning the song I once adored best in the world?"

I didn't anticipate that Jo, the main character speaking in that passage, would resolve her midlife crisis in the way that she did, and I didn't plan on using the events of September 11 at all.  But I did, and in the short story that I was writing last week, Sept. 11 surfaces again.

Last week's story is about Jo's granddaughter, who is at the end of her teens and has decided to take time to explore her artistic passions.  This part of the story is narrated by her father:

"'You know, your mother’s mother had a brief time in the art spotlight. Something to do with hands and September 11.'

'September 11?'

'You remember, when planes flew into the Pentagon and into two towers of the World Trade Center?” When my daughter shook her head, I shook my own head too. “What are they teaching you kids in schools these days?'

'Don’t get off track, Daddy. I think we’re in agreement about my shoddy education. Back to Grandma’s art career.'"

The story takes place in the late 2030's, a time when 2001 will be a distant memory.  Even now, when it's not a distant memory, 2001 is getting to be some time ago.  It's interesting to think about how future generations will interpret the events of Sept. 11, 2001.  Will it be seen as minor, in light of horrors yet to come?  Will it be seen as one terrorist event in a long string of terrorist events?

As a fiction writer, I can speculate.  As a human, I wish I could know.

Natasha Trethewey: Poet Laureate

I am SO thrilled to hear that Natasha Trethewey will be our next poet laureate.  How many ways am I thrilled?  Let's see, she's my age, 46, when the last several poet laureates have been into their 80's.  Nothing wrong with being older, of course.  But how wonderful to have a younger poet laureate, my generation!  In fact, I think she's the youngest poet laureate ever.

Let us now play what I call the Norton Anthology game.  When I got my first Norton Anthology of American Lit, I looked at the birth years of all the living poets.  They had all been born long before me.  I suspect that now, there might be one or two born after me.  I'm not brave enough to look anymore.

But back to Natasha Trethewey.  Not only is she younger, but she's female.  She's biracial (her father was Caucasion, her mother African-American) and from the U.S. South.  Our first Southern poet laureate,  since Robert Penn Warren, unless you count Rita Dove, who has lived in the South for many years.

And she's a fabulous poet.  Breathtaking.  Native Guard is one of my all-time favorite books of poetry.

Longtime readers of this blog may remember my blog post about Natasha's Trethewey's February 2010 reading at Broward College.  I remember more for the question and answer period afterwards as for her reading, which was fabulous in and of itself.

I asked her how she put together her book Native Guard, which weaves poems of Civil War soldiers together so seamlessly with poems about her mother's death.  Here's what I wrote 2 years ago:
"She said that she was working on poems about her experience of growing up the child of a mixed race marriage in the South and on poems about the black soldiers, often forgotten and nameless, of the Civil War. She said she didn't realize at first that her book would also include poems about the loss of her mother.


She recounted an experience where she was running through a cemetery near her Georgia house, and she could almost hear ancient voices talking to her. She talked about the end of the poem, "Graveyard Blues," the couplet that talks about her mother's headstone. She talked about that poem coming to her in a rush, and that the end is a fiction, that she wrote it even as she realized that her mother had no headstone. She realized that her mother was just as lost and nameless as those black, Union soldiers. And thus, she realized how the poems all worked together."

Much as I love Natasha Trethewey, I wouldn't want to be the person who has to decide on the one person who should hold the post of poet laureate.  We live in an amazing poetry time.  It would be tough to decide on just one person to honor.

I pondered this fact as I read this article about Natasha Trethewey in The New York Times:

"In a phone interview explaining his choice James Billington, the librarian of Congress, said: 'We’re not necessarily on some kick to find a younger poet. The more I read of it, American poetry seems extremely rich in diversity, talent and freedom of expression, and she has a voice that is already original and accomplished. I have an affinity for American individuals who are absolutely unique, and I think that this is one.'


He first became aware of Ms. Trethewey (pronounced TRETH-eh-way) when she gave a reading at the National Book Festival in 2004: 'I admired the way she had a certain classical sound but also moved easily from traditional forms to free verse. And then when I began reading her poems for myself, that impression was just confirmed. It seemed very natural, all of a piece.' He added: 'I go to a fair number of poetry readings, and I’m not always motivated to go back and read the poems. But in her case I was.'

Indeed.  And now, maybe a whole nation will be inspired to read her poems.

Anniversary Thoughts

On this day in 1988, at 11:00 a.m., my college sweetheart and I married each other.  We got married in Greenwood, South Carolina, in the same church where my parents got married and where my grandfather had been pastor for several decades before he retired--my parents will be celebrating their 50th anniversary in October 2012.  We chose an early wedding time because we had family and friends who would be facing a long drive after our wedding.  We had the reception in the church fellowship hall.

After a quick honeymoon in Asheville, it was back to grad school.  In some ways, our lives didn't change much.  In some ways, our lives would never be the same.

Most couples can probably say the same thing.  They can probably point to storms weathered and unpleasant truths discovered.  They can probably point to support, both expected and unexpected.  They can probably talk about changes, both important and unimportant.

As I look back, I'm somewhat amazed at how young we were.  I had just turned 23, and he would be 24 in September.  Did we know what we were getting into?  Does anyone ever?

As I look back at our wedding, and I think about weddings now, I'm amazed at what a beautiful wedding we had for such a tiny sum of money (less than $1000).  Part of it was my insistence that the wedding not cost much, coupled with my mom's desire for a beautiful day.  Part of it was that we were married in a small town church, where we didn't have to rent a hall or pay huge costs for a meal or incur the costs that come with alcohol.

That was such a long time ago that we haven't even digitized those pictures.  So, I can't share the picture of my grandmother ironing my wedding dress.  You can't see my face as I sipped the champagne that my parents had bought when they were stationed in France and saved for their daughter's wedding.  Champagne was not meant to be aged for 23 years!  You can't look at pictures of all of us as very young people.

Once, a dinner guest looked at our wedding pictures and said, "Look, pictures from your first marriage."

In some ways, it feels that way:  we're both older now, so different.  And yet, we're still so much the same.

If I could travel back in time, what would I tell those crazy kids?  I'd say, "Go ahead.  Get married.  Make that commitment in front of God, your family, and your friends.  You'll make some sacrifices, but it's better to go through life with a supportive person by your side than to be out there alone."

I know that I've been lucky.  We've been through some hard times, but they could have been worse.  I've been lucky in that I'm allowed to marry the one I love with the benefits that come from that.  We've been lucky in that one of us has always been fully employed, even if we've rarely both been fully employed at the same time.  I'm lucky in that we both have simple wants and needs.  Our marriage would not have survived if one of us had been the type of person who got our self-worth from having more and more expensive stuff.  I'm lucky in that we've both changed, but not in directions that made continued marriage impossible.

I'm hoping for another 23 years of luck and love.  I'm hoping for love for us all in these difficult times, in whatever form(s) we'd like that love to take.