brushfire"This, yes, this, it was always like this." -Stanley Koehler
REFLECTIONS OF AN EMPTY NESTER
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My niece is getting married at the end of the month. It promises to be a grand affair — a blending of cultures with the central events a Christian marriage ceremony and luncheon followed by a Baraat — the groom’s wedding procession — and Hindu marriage ceremony and reception. My family members and I are excited to take part in the festivities, from donning Indian attire and having henna applied during Mehendi night to participating in a family dance to the tune of “Happy.” My sister — the mother of the bride — has asked me to speak at the reception. I’m honored, though a bit daunted, by the request. As I reflect on to say — what advice I can impart to these 20-somethings, each embarked on an illustrious career in the medical field — I find myself calling on my usual Muse: my father. He always had the right words for every occasion, usually in the form of a poem. I have no such poem to offer the bride and groom, but I can share what I learned from my father on five essential themes: love, happiness, marriage, parenthood and life. I will begin with love. My father wrote a poem about love, even though he insisted it was about snow. In part, it reads: “So this is how / it comes, / no thunder, wind, / or windstorm’s / violence to rend / our lower nature, / only a presence …. Without event / the miracle is here.” I could write volumes on what my father taught me about happiness. Mainly it wasn’t what he said; it was how he lived, enjoying and appreciating life’s rituals and traditions — even the most mundane. But here’s an anecdote. My family was about to move to Grosse Pointe to embark on a new chapter in our lives. I was talking to my father on the phone, telling him I didn’t want to leave because I loved our life in Baltimore. “If you’re happy where you are, you’ll be happy where you’re going,” he said. I’m confident my niece and future nephew-in-law will take their own happiness with them wherever life leads them. On marriage. My mother once told me that early in her marriage, she felt trapped. Her world, she feared, had narrowed to this one man. She shared her feelings with my father. His response? Why, he said, I rather looked at it that my world had doubled. Knowing this young couple’s two families, I believe this will be the case with them. Their lives combined will make for a more whole, more complete world — what my father meant in his poem, “Half,” written for my mother, “the whole we were not till / the halves so met in us / made one, one love, one life.” Next, I suspect, comes parenthood. While my father was not one to impart parenting advice — so much of the example he set was by instinct — he lived by one essential mantra: to be present. When we were fixing up our family home after our parents were gone, we had difficulty closing the double doors in my father’s study due to rusty, unused hinges. That’s because over nearly 60 years, he rarely closed them. And finally, on life. Late in my father’s life, my sister had the presence of mind to ask him what was the secret to a long and happy life. “Marg,” he said, “I’ll tell you. Two words. Routine and destination.” I think I will close my toast with these words and the sincere wish my niece and her new husband begin their marriage with the blessing and promise of such a life. This appeared in the Sept. 7, 2017 issue of the Grosse Pointe News.
2 Comments
Jenny
10/2/2017 04:08:45 pm
Wonderfully written, little sister! Big sis (not me, I am the middle sis) was right to ask you to do the toast! Congratulations on a job well done!
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Mary Anne
10/2/2017 04:53:45 pm
Thanks, middle sis!
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Mary Anne BrushJournalist, fiction writer, wife and mother |