TOO SOON?

I WATCHED “The Crown” on Netflix. If it’s to be believed, the Queen and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh didn’t have what we might think of as a typical marriage. Maybe he was no “prince”, but it strikes me that the Queen wasn’t ever what you might call warm and cuddly.

Now that she’s single again, could there romance in her future? I’m sure there’s probably a royal rule of decorum that dictates an appropriate time of mourning, but at 95, she doesn’t have long. And, her pool of potential suitors is drying up fast. Of course she is the Queen Mother. I guess she could pick a younger, healthier object—I mean subject.

Writer, David Sedaris, reflected in a recent essay in The New Yorker on the issue of how much younger a prospective mate can be than you:

“There’s a formula for dating someone younger than you,” my friend Aaron in Seattle once told me. “The cutoff,” he explained, “is your age divided by two plus seven.” At the time, I was fifty-nine, meaning that the youngest I could go, new-boyfriend-wise, was thirty-six and a half. That’s not a jaw-dropping difference, but, although it might seem tempting, there’d be a lot that someone under forty probably wouldn’t know, like who George Raft was, or what hippies smelled like. And, little by little, wouldn’t those gaps add up, and leave you feeling even older than you actually are?

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For me that’s irrelevant.

The day of our 49th anniversary is fast-approaching. How is it possible? I think I understand and appreciate how wonderful that it is, but I don’t know that I can. The significance is too deep and beautiful. While My Amazing Missus and I are two individuals, for me at least the lines of individuality have blurred and I am totally fine with that. So my thoughts and views are colored by hers, so much so that I honestly don’t know how I would perceive the world had I not spent my life with her.

At 70, I’m not taking it for granted, but I’m resting in a fairly strong sense of confidence she’s not going to leave for some guy with more hair and less BMI.

I don’t want to experience the heartbreak of Washington Hogwallop (O Brother Where Art Thou?) when asked where his wife was:

Washington Hogwallop : Mrs. Hogwallop up and R-U-N-N-O-F-T.

Ulysses Everett McGill : She musta been lookin' for answers.

Washington Hogwallop : Possibly. Good riddance as far as I'm concerned. I do miss her cookin' though.

I have been the officiant of many weddings. Officiant: that’s a weird word. It is a person who officiates at a wedding—almost as if the he or she should be wearing a stripped shirt and a whistle, which might be appropriate in the upcoming days of the marriage.

Every time, as I’m meeting with the young couple to talk about marriage and plan their wedding, I wonder about their chances of making it. Sometimes the unions I’ve felt most confident about have dissolved, and then the ones when you hope someone saved the receipts for the wedding gifts, have endured to this day.

What is it that makes the difference? Can you see it in their eyes? Can you count the odds against or in favor? Is there something at work in it all: luck, fate, providence?

I have a friend who has counseled many, many, many struggling couples. He says that experience has taught him that if a person’s second marriage is a success, the first one wasn’t necessarily a failure. I have another sweetheart of a friend who calls her first marriage her “starter marriage” and highly recommends them.

For me, I’m happy with just the one.

Unless you were born into a culture where your marriage is arranged, and you choose to marry, you take the journey of finding, of discovering, of learning, of giving, of having, holding, of loving and being loved. You navigate things like: getting to know one another, differences, lust, passion, learning to like one another.

In most every wedding ceremony I do I quote C.S. Lewis, “Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.”

It takes both. Be lovers and be friends.

Is there anything more tragic than a loveless marriage, one where the two aren’t best friends?

Love is risky.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Recently, I’ve been looking through my folder of poems and writings about love and such. I found this one, called “Waiting”. Every time I read it, I am grateful again for my own marriage—to have found My Amazing-Missus more than 49 years ago.

WAITING
By Raymond Carver

Left off the highway and
down the hill. At the
bottom, hang another left.
Keep bearing left. The road
will make a Y. Left again.
There's a creek on the left.
Keep going. Just before
the road ends, there'll be
another road. Take it
and no other. Otherwise,
your life will be ruined
forever. There's a log house
with a shake roof, on the left.
It's not that house. It's
the next house, just over
a rise. The house
where trees are laden with
fruit. Where phlox, forsythia,
and marigold grow. It's
the house where the woman
stands in the doorway
wearing the sun in her hair. The one
who's been waiting
all this time.
The woman who loves you.
The one who can say,
"What's kept you?"

A CARNATION CORSAGE

THERE IS A WORTHWHILENESS TO SPECIAL MOMENTS. I didn’t really see it at the time. We seldom do.

Last Saturday, we had a long-awaited memorial for my mom. She passed in December; COVID. In these days I’ve been thinking about her. One of my memories is her propensity and priority of making special moments for others. It was a clear theme in the stories her grandchildren told about her at the memorial. Many others would have stories to tell. I want to tell this one.

A tradition among churches during my first coming-of-age was something called The Annual Sweetheart Banquet, usually around Valentine’s Day. I experienced numerous ASBs, among various denominations. The format was pretty much the same except when it came to the program. Some churches allowed and encourgaged dancing. I know this because I was a drummer in a group that played gigs like ASBs, Teen Towns, Mixers, etc. There was no dancing though at baptist ASBs. Usually, there was a speaker, maybe a friend of the pastor or maybe the pastor himself, who would tell corny jokes like: What did Winnie The Pooh and John The Baptist have in common? Same middle name.

There would be a dinner prepared and served by the ladies of the church—usually ham, scalloped potatoes, green beans, Jello with something suspended in it like carrot slivers, and cake. At each placesetting there would be a little cup with candy hearts and another with mixed nuts. There were a lot of red construction paper hearts glued to white paper doilies. Maybe the church pianist would play “dinner music” on the somewhat tuned piano in the fellowship hall; a piano that normally only played tunes like “Onward Christian Soldiers,” but on this night might play, “I Left My Heart In San Francisco.”

Teens (as we were known then) would dress up and maybe pair up with a “date”. This is where my mom focused and excelled. She seemed to think it vital that everyone have a date whether they wanted one or not. There wasn’t much to the whole date thing except for having the moment memorialized in a photo of the happy couple standing beneath a heart-shaped arch.

Arranging dates was so important to my mom that I can remember her pimping me out as an escort for dateless young ladies to their own ASB; maybe she was the daughter of a friend or a girl from the school where mom worked. Mom would choreograph the whole thing. She would make ready my wardrobe: a starched shirt, slacks, shined penny loafers, my madras sportscoat and a skinny black tie. In the refrigerator next to the eggs was a clear plastic box containing a carnation corsage for me to give the young lady.

This was before Don McLean juxstaposed the young naivete of an innocent carnation moment against the hard realities of life in his lyric from “American Pie”:

I was a lonely teenage broncin' buck
With a pink carnation and a pickup truck
But I knew I was out of luck
The day the music died

I wasn’t a broncin’ buck and didn’t have a pickup truck. Fact is, being pre-16, mom would drive me to pick up the date. I would walk to the door wondering if the girl was also getting money to buy a new Beatles’s album for doing this. Clearly my mom was the most excited about these contrived encounters. She wasn’t hoping for a spark that might lead to something bigger. She just wanted a couple of young people to feel special for a moment—the kind that comes from dressing up, sweaty palms, maybe a new friend, a photograph and a memory.

And who knows, maybe it brought back a sweet thought for her of a skinny young soldier from Louisiana, asking a cheerleader from Okmulgee, Oklahoma for a couples skate.

YOU'VE A GOT A FRIEND

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[FIRST. I had told myself I would avoid politics here on my blog as best I could, but some things need to be said. I wrote this for my personal journal—not intending to share it. Then I read it to a friend who said, “That’s not about politics. That’s about friendship.” He’s right. It is about friendship; my friendship with James and everyone who is a friend whether we agree or not.]

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FROM TIME TO TIME, someone will bring up politics in a conversation with me by saying, “Your friend James Lankford…”

JAMES, ME & OUR AMAZING MISSUSES

Then they try to move the conversation one of several directions: either they think I’m cool to have a friend in high places deadset on protecting us all from the liberals, or they want me to know that they know I have a friend whose fingerprints are all over the Kool-Aid pitcher in the Whitehouse kitchen.

Either way, it’s guilt by association. Why do we do that? I don’t think that I would assume that just because you might have been on a bowling team with Ted Cruz that you are a political nutjob or that his daddy and your daddy had anything at all to do with the Kennedy assassination. (He didn’t did he?)

James and I are friends. We don’t play tennis together or exchange recipes or vacation together. The only time we talk these days is if we happen to see each other at a restaurant, which hasn’t happened since last March, unless we happened to park next to each other at curbside pickup.

I got to know James way before his life in politics. In our early conversations, politics never came up. Here’s how we met. In the 80s, I worked as the youth ministry consultant for Oklahoma Baptist churches. During that time a movement began, known as the “conservative takeover” of the Southern Baptist Convention. The movement, in my view, was set to destroy doctrines that I believed to be not only right, but essential to a church that claimed to follow Jesus.

Not all people and not all churches were signing up for this takeover, but still, for me, in the role I was in; I couldn’t see myself continuing there. During this time I made friends with a guy who understood what was going on and could empathize with the dilemma. He was also a friend that could offer me a lifeline—a way to support my family and still have a ministry to youth. I took it!

After I left the Baptist convention position there was a time of transition, and ultimately they hired a guy for a similar version of that role. That guy was James Lankford. On a couple of occasions I would meet with him to talk about what work had been done, what the priorities were then and what they could be going forward. And that’s how we became friends—over a shared passion for teenagers.

Today we’ve both moved on. We’re too old and disengaged from youth culture to matter or make a difference. So, do we have anything left in common?

Here’s one thing: I would love to have James’ voice. I don’t mean I want to be a senator and be on Fox News. Just being an informed and conscientious voter consumes all the energy I want to give to political involvement these days. When I say I would love to have James’ voice, I don’t mean his words. Don’t get me wrong: James is smart, he is perceptive, and I believe he wants to represent Oklahoma well. But his words of late are not my words.

Please, let me try to navigate these next few paragraphs, knowing that my words will fail, but I’m trying to speak without alienating. I do understand the concern about the drift of our culture, the impact of “elites” and “fundamentalists”. I get the concern about globalization and cosmopolitanism. The desire of the evangelicals to explain declining numbers? I get that too. I hear the argument that people like Donald Trump seem to be necessary in order to reverse the perceived morphing of America. Here’s my question: At what cost? I’ve asked Senator Lankford this question many times.

I am not writing this to defend James or defame him. He is my friend. I do not agree with him on the best ways to solve America’s political and social woes. He and I talked early in his time as a U.S. Representative, before becoming a senator. I asked him how it was being a member of the House. He said it’s pretty much constant negotiating: I’ll support your deal if you support mine. A lot of listening to lobbyists and reading bills. Those are not his exact words, but close. I am fearful that at some point James could become a Politician—a Washington insider, a fortune seeker. I am fearful that is one of the worst things that can happen to our elected representatives.

When I say I would love to have his voice I mean I would love to have that deep, resonate bass voice, but I would not use it in unison with Ted Cruz to read “Green Eggs and Ham” or to join the chorus of his eleven who are conniving to overturn constitutional processes with their collective, elected voices. It sounds sort of like sedition—this challenge of state’s electoral votes on January 6. Please James, as one friend to another…

This is nothing new, I understand that. Many years ago, Will Rogers said:

“About all I can say for the United States Senate
is that it opens with a prayer and closes with an investigation.”

Thankfully, friendship can survive politics. If it can’t; politics isn’t worth it, or the friendship wasn’t genuine to begin with.

Please don’t feel like you need to respond or explain to me how things really are. I’m old. I’m set in ways. I will remain unswayed. I am hard-headed, but not hard-hearted. Disagreement doesn’t diminish friendships for me. I will always call James my friend.

Now to quote Penny Wharvey McGill (O Brother Where Art Thou):

“I’ve spoken my piece and counted to three.”

COMPASSIONATE, CURIOUS, CLASSY

SHE WAS A HIGH SCHOOL CHEERLEADER. The fact is that she was everyone’s cheerleader. If you knew her at all; she knew you. She was compassionately curious.

For many years she worked at Webster High School in Tulsa. I don’t know what the sign on her office door said, but her unofficial role was student counselor. Oh, she didn’t tell you how to apply for a scholarship, or help you pick a college to apply to. She dealt in matters of the heart, boyfriends, parents who didn’t understand, that kind of stuff. She was a full-attention listener and cheerleader to all—especially students.

Throughout her life she dug into the details of people she would meet. Nosey isn’t the right word (although applicable). She was genuinely interested in people. Everyone mattered to her.

A conversation with her of late might go something like this: “Well I had another new nurse today. She’s a lovely girl, but I don’t know that I like this guy she’s shacked up with, and her poor kids, I don’t know where their next meal is coming from much less a Christmas present and a warm winter coat, and the little girl? We don’t know where her daddy is.”

[NOTE TO SELF: Remember to make a donation to that fund Mom helped with to give kids school supplies next fall.]

Her concerned inquisitiveness and intense cheerleading was well-known and valued (most of the time) by me, my brother, our spouses, our kids and our kid’s kids, and by her siblings, who are all gone now except for Uncle Bill and her nieces and nephews. They all knew she loved them.

Last night, Saturday, December 19, 2020 at about 10:00a, I was on the phone with my niece. She was by Mom’s side in a hospice room at Mercy hospital. She told me that a nurse had just been in to check on her. The nurse wondered how she was hanging on. Maybe she didn’t know Mom is a fighter. The nurse asked Ashley if she knew of anything Mom could be waiting for. Ashley told her that it was probably because her Grandma didn’t want to miss out on anything.

An hour later, she passed.

My guess is that Dad met her at the gate, and she began to tell him about all the nice doctors and nurses who cared for her, even that one that she “couldn’t understand a word they said,” and about how tired they all were from helping the COVID people.

Then in my limited understanding of heaven, Dad probably said, “Let me show you around. There are a lot of people waiting to say hello. And good news—we can hug here.”

And mom would say, “Did so and so make it?” And then she would say, “Can you get an ice cold Diet Dr. Pepper here?”