Entry for 19 August 2023:
(Diane & Robert fiftieth wedding anniversary, with notes for our grandkids)
1. A Story of Us and How We Got Together
You
Me:
50 years
Watergate to Ukraine
Green youth to gray age
You
Me:
Grand Forks
Palo Alto
Both born in the very midst of a turbulent century
In the shadow of two great and horrid wars
Grandchildren of the Great Depression.
First-born to bright, educated, caring
But quite young parents
Themselves youngest, or almost youngest, children,
Dads still studying, arcane lore.
Moms doing odd bits of work and raising us
Your mom as short as my mom was tall
All of us learning as we went.
You
Me:
Pleasanton
Lodi
Raised in small, flat California towns
In the process of becoming suburbs
In the buttoned-down 1950’s.
Children of privilege
That we did not even recognize at the time:
WEIRD WASPs.
(Note: By WASPs we don’t mean the stinging insects
but White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant;
and WEIRD stands for Western, Educated,
Industrialized, Rich, Democratic.)
You
Me:
Santa Cruz
Los Angeles
Wearing the privilege of oldest children,
Used to responsibility for others
But ambivalent about our power,
Proud but burdened.
Glad to escape to university
As soon as we could
We happily exchanged
The small uptight inland places
For a counter-cultural beach town
That we were almost too square for.
Looking back, it’s striking
We could have shared so much:
But it’s no surprise we immediately
During orientation week
Recognized each other as fellow refugees.
And then remained friends for years
As we grew, experimented,
had other crushes and connections,
Began to learn who we were,
And eventually, in a time of transition,
found our way back to each other.
And thence to the big city and marriage
Full of the usual sorts of contradictions
Shy extraverts
Traditionally heterosexual
But androgenous, tolerant and curious
Sheltered from major loss and trauma
But acquainted with sorrow and failure.
Optimistic pessimists (or is it the other way round?)
Blending acceptance and pickiness,
Stubbornness and flexibility.
We like a good laugh but do not suffer fools gladly;
We do not insist on our way
But do not like at all to be pushed around.
We did not imagine that our shared background
And rampant contradictions would turn out to be
Just what we needed for a fifty-year journey together.
2. Fifty Years Passes
Like the time-lapse photos
our granddaughter Mizuki took
Of her flight here from Seattle,
Or a magical version
of our living room gliding love seat
which our grandson Yuki immediately takes to
Rocking it vigorously as he tries
to reach the land of his imagination,
We now play back the past fifty years
Since our wedding:
They flash by in our minds,
Rocking us repeatedly back
To places and people
Both remembered and (until now) forgotten.
Days, years; beginnings, endings;
A rhythm of repetition
And each moment unique:
Toledo, Sheffield,
Toledo, Leuven,
Toledo, Toronto,
Toledo, Melbourne,
Toledo, (sons to Cleveland),
Glasgow.
Pleasanton.
Over these many years,
The elder generations pass:
The last remaining grandparents, then parents,
Aunts, uncles, teachers,
Friends timely and untimely lost,
Until we are the elders,
And our passing, still unknown
Is nevertheless not that far away.
In the meantime, we’ve been looking
Through old photos of us
Excavating the layers of the years:
We wonder at our younger selves,
When was this?
Who were those people?
Were they really us?
Yet we know the answer:
Yes, they are all still in there
Mizuki’s time lapse
Of flickering faces and places
This crowd of us
Wildly varying hairstyles
Strange, but not strangers to us,
In all these different places
Exotic and mundane
With all these different people
Who we have loved
And who have loved us.
* * *
Yuki’s commandeered our rocking sofa;
It’s now a time machine
Swinging us creakily through the years.
“Don’t swing too hard!”
We tell him repeatedly
For we fear It will break us
And our old-but-young-at-hearts hearts.
(Link to Mizuki's airplane timelapse movie)
3. The Secret of a Long Marriage
It appears that being married for 50 years or more
Is unusual enough these days
That people want to know what our secret is.
The fact is, we don’t know
And fear to look too closely
As if that might jinx the whole thing
Like the poor centipede trying to figure
How it walks and falling
Into a ditch instead.
Nevertheless, friends have pressed us
With questions and pet theories:
One said the secret was “Inertia”;
Another, “Failure of Imagination.”
To these I’m inclined to add
“Insecure Attachment” and “Stubbornness”.
But I think all of these miss the point:
We know that close relationships
Are inherently unstable
And difficult to maintain.
Stability is either an illusion,
A skewed family system (psychobabble
for one person having too much power),
Or the result of hard work.
As in the universe itself
Entropy is the law.
We learned this in the tenth year of our marriage
When I had survived my tenure vote
(Following years of severe workaholism),
When our first child was two
(Sorry, kids and grandkids,
But having kids
Is a huge stressor for couples),
Only to face the abyss between us.
A year of couples therapy helped us through this
And from that experience
We took two essential things:
One: A microwave oven, which lasted 34 years
(we gave up on it, before it gave up on us);
Two: Not taking ourselves too seriously,
Which is timeless.
The fact is, we are both very aware of the other’s
annoying habits, limitations and emotional allergies,
Which we constantly try to correct
Even though we know perfectly well
that this is impossible
And would make the other
A perfect person,
who we wouldn’t even recognize
… And might even feel inferior to.
And we know all too well
that even though other people
Might see us as caring,
thoughtful, good-hearted and so on,
We can each at times
“In our present imperfection”
act like jerks toward the other,
Especially when stressed, ill or emotionally injured.
And so from time to time
One or the other of us
Realizes that there’s a problem:
Something’s gotten out of balance between us,
One of us has begun to disengage.
This means:
There is an unattended-to injury
That must be addressed,
Painful truths spoken,
New understandings to surprise us,
New accommodations to be forged.
The result:
We muddle through,
For better or for worse
Helped by friends and family
Deeply grateful for the time we’ve had together,
Knowing it to be completely mundane
And at the same time completely amazing,
Treasuring the times we’ve had with each other
And the times that remain to us
Knowing that it’s all temporary
And therefore infinitely precious.
4. Coda
(Note: A Coda is a part
Near the end of something
Where you review
The main points of the whole thing,
so you can finish.)
We are two people with many similarities,
And just as many inner contradictions
As most people.
We found each other when we were still pretty young,
Thought it would cool to get married,
Then found out how hard it is
To make a life together.
If we wanted to stay together
(Which we did),
We had to figure out
How to make our little family
Work over a long time.
But we didn’t do this on our own,
Because we had a lot of support
From the people who loved and surrounded us
And who we loved and still love.
Eventually, we reached a point where
There is more happiness than pain,
And many shared moments
Of joy and connection,
Built on all
we’ve been given by life.
And we know that these moments,
Won by hard work and stubbornness,
These moments will always be
And will always have been.
For this we thank you,
Our family, our friends, our community.
-Robert Elliott, 18/19 August 2023
(Drawing by Mizuki Elliott, (c) 2023)
(Link to 50-year slideshow of Diane & Robert, created by Brendan Elliott)
(Link to Robert reading this poem)
