anniversary poems

So today is my parents' 40th wedding anniversary. (I've written about them and their anniversary elsewhere.) 40 years is a big deal. Unfortunately, there's no real way for me and my brother to make a fuss about them right now. Some kids get to send their parents on dream vacations for a big anniversary--but not us. They've been sending themselves on dream vacations for quite some time now, having followed through on their lifelong plan to retire early and travel. (You have to check out Mom's blog--the sidebar calendar alone makes me weary.) And I'm not rich enough to buy them diamond rings, and they're too far away for me to make them fresh chocolate chip cookies (those being the two gifts that Miss Manners says are never unwelcome). So all that's left to be done is to write an anniversary ode.

Unfortunately, when the Muse speaks to me, these are the kinds of things she says....

Roses are red
Violets are blue
You are my dove
Or perhaps cockatoo.

Roses are red
Violets are blue
You make me burn hotter
Than beef vindaloo.

Violets are blue
Roses are red
Life without you?
I'd rather be dead.

Roses are red
Daffodils yellow
One look at you
And I turn to jello.

The rose it is red
The leaf it is green
If you'd be my love
That sure would be keen.

Violets are blue
Except when they're indigo
Your rival may woo
But I will tell him to go.

Roses are red
Blue is the violet
I could fly high
With you for co-pilot.

Roses are red
Marigolds orange
I am a door
And you are a door-hinge.

Violets are blue
And so are hydrangea
I would be too
If you were a stranger.

Trees they are wooden
And so is a boomerang
You'll make me puddin'
And I will make you meringue.

Clouds may be grey
But their linings are silver
For you I would steal
--Well, maybe just pilfer.

Roses are red
Sunset is golden
My world is complete
When you I am holdin'.

So. Happy anniversary, my dear parents, wherever you are today.

why I love my parents, reason #329

Scene: driving in the outskirts of York, past a shop with a big sign that says "TYRES BATTERIES CLUTCHES"

me: Hey look! That shop sells ancient Mediterranean seaports.
Dad: And coastal gun emplacements.
Mom: It's a bit ambiguous, though, about whether it also sells evening purses or groups of eggs.
me: Either way, that's quite a diverse product line.

why I love my family, reason #476

I recently spent several hours in the car with my brother. Road trips with him are more fun than with almost anyone else. He's ready to switch at a moment's notice from unfeigned enthusiasm about the scenery, to earnest discussions of Canadian foreign policy, in which I invariably learn something, to gleeful random silliness. In a lull in the conversation, I started meowing a Christmas carol, and....

what?

oh fine. I'll start from the beginning.

Some years ago, T-Regina was given an...object for Christmas. It was a wall plaque with a dozen or so plush kitten heads mounted on it. They were arranged in the shape of a Christmas tree. When you pressed a button, they would all start meowing, and each of them meowed at a different pitch, and their meows were synchronized so that they would produce more-or-less recognizable versions of several Christmas songs. I have never quite recovered from their version of "Jingle Bells." I wouldn't exactly say that it's changed the course of my life; it's more that it's changed me. To this day, there are moments at which I'm compelled to start imitating the kittens' songs. Mostly people are so disoriented by this that they never do settle on a response. "You're meow...what...christmas...june...huh?" is the closest most come. My brother, on the other hand, joined in. Before I'd meowed my way to the end of the first bar of "O Christmas Tree," he was meowing along with me. In harmony.

The next day, the impulse seized me again, when he and our father and I were puttering about the kitchen. We had three-part meowing harmony going there for a bit.

(If Mom hadn't been reformatting her hard drive, it might have been four part harmony.)

May 12, 1967

Oscar Wilde is appalled by people who wash their clean laundry in public. Nevertheless, I have to take a moment to brag about my parents.

Thirty-eight years ago today, they got married. They were barely into their twenties (they'd just graduated from university, having started it early as precocious youngsters). It being 1967, the bride wore a yellow hand-crocheted dress, and the wedding photos were taken on the lawn of the Unitarian church they'd found for the occasion. They were still just kids. They freely admit that they had absolutely no idea what they were getting into.

They've kept the promises that they made that day.



...I'm trying to think of something to add to that statement. It stands by itself. It's utterly staggering.

Two things come immediately mind when I try to talk about their relationship. One is a line Mom used in one of her sermons, about how human love exists to give us a foretaste of God's love, and how she experiences God's love in her own life by means of the tender, steadfast love of her husband. (That one still makes me a little teary.) The other is Dad's habit of kissing Mom the moment he came in the door when he got home from work. I can't remember a single time, through a long career that often made him compare himself wistfully to Count Belisarius, when he let himself get too preoccupied to greet her properly.

When I start counting my blessings, sometimes it seems redundant to list anything except my parents. I didn't do anything to deserve to be born to people who would model for me whole-hearted ethical compassion, and who would show me how love can be used as the organizing principle of a life--one's own life, the life of a family, and the life of a community.

Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad.


family, 1975

I'm sitting at my computer wrapped in an afghan made for me by my dear late great-aunt Margaret, wearing a sweater made by my grandmother, socks made for me by my mother, a shirt that was a gift from T-Regina, a skirt that used to belong to Elisa, and underwear that...uh, let's not go there.

In the most simplistic and literal-minded way possible, I am enveloped from head to toe in love.

unstripper

The last one seemed to go over well, so here's another random childhood thing.

When I was (again) sixish, I learned from somewhere or other (possibly my friend Elizabeth who not only had a teenaged sister and brother but also went to a Catholic school) about strippers--people who get paid to take their clothes off. This idea seemed a bit odd to me, a little like someone getting paid to brush their teeth, but I took it in stride. After all, my parents had explained that, although grownups called children silly for doing silly childish things, grownups themselves frequently did things that were just as silly but in a grownup way. So I figured that this was just another example of grownup silliness.

Upon further reflection, though, another thing was clear: If there were people who were paid to take their clothes off, then by analogy there must be other people who were paid to put their clothes on.

For quite some time after I made this deduction, I would announce to Mommy, when she came up to help me get ready for bed, "I'm going to do a strip show now," and then methodically take off my clothes--and then say "And now I'll do an unstrip show," and put on my nightgown. (There may have been prancing about and ABBA music involved--I don't recall--but if there was it was certainly of the "I'm a fairy princess" variety.)

Eventually I lost interest in unstrip shows, but I never really questioned my certainty that there were unstrippers. To this day I find myself speculating that this idea could be a gold mine of career possibilities.

Ambition

One day, when I was about six, I heard something on the radio news about someone being assassinated. I asked my mommy what it meant. She explained that it was what they called it when someone famous was murdered.

I was enraptured. To be so important that your death has its own separate category--and such a gorgeously sibilant one at that--...that seemed to me to be something worth striving for.

And thus it was that I shocked an avuncular friend of the family when, to his friendly question, "Well, and what do you want to be when you grow up?" I calmly replied, "Assassinated."

Socks!

My mother e-mailed me a little while ago to make sure she had my address correct in her palm pilot, because she wanted to mail me some socks she had finished knitting for me. Quite aside from it being wonderful to have people I love make things for me, this was an e-mail that pleased me greatly: the combination of high and low tech was just too delicious.

And of course the socks themselves are lovely. The pattern is extremely intricate, and they're one of my favourite colours of blue.

As I write, my feet are both warm and happy. (yes, feet have feelings too.)

Christmas inventory

• Playing of Messiah: several times on CD, several times (extracts) live, courtesy of the Family Chamber Consort, known far and wide for their enthusiasm, and perhaps someday to be known far and wide for their skill.
• Crackling wood fire: one. ... Well, okay, it was on TV: the local cable channel broadcast a video of a fire with stockings hanging beside it.
• Christmas crackers: eight. Five for us, and three for the girls down the street who shovelled our driveway while we were eating dinner.
• Jokes in the Christmas crackers: 48, including the ones in French and Spanish.
• Funny jokes in the Christmas crackers: zero.
• but!!! paper crowns that fit: all of them, pretty much--a first, since most of us have enormous noggins.
• Loaves of banana bread made to give to various aunts and church members: twelve.
• Loaves of banana bread that came out of the pan intact: three.
• Standard-issue Christmas trees: zero. We didn't bother to get a cut-down evergreen this year, opting instead to load as many ornaments as possible onto my parents little potted fig tree. It actually looked entirely charming.
• Family members: five.
• Healthy family members: one. (What with my mother's chronic sinus infection and my brother's resurgent malaria and such like, I was the only really able-bodied one in the house today.)
• Family members that joined the family in the past three years: one. (Begüm, my parents' former exchange student from Turkey, is their new daughter. My parents have taught her a lot of English, with the result that she is constantly convulsing me by using one of my father's characteristic expressions with his exact intonation. She's going to school in Canada now, and this is the third Christmas she's spent with my family. Since this is only her third Christmas ever (she's a good Muslim herself), she's endearingly enthusiastic about decorating the Christmas (fig) tree and opening presents...I had to scold her several times for trying to peek under the wrapping paper of the gifts that were under the tree.)
• Amount of food eaten: too much.
• Number of dishes washed: ten thousand (approximately).
• Amount of love present: incalculable.

Everything I need to know I learned from my father

Coriander goes with everything.

Don't practice random kindness. Practice systematic, deliberate kindness.

Sometimes a good cry really does help.

People hush up when you sing to them. (Note: this is particularly useful when you've got a colicky baby on your hands.)

It's never a bad idea to stop for a think break.

If something's worth doing, it's worth doing

• with your whole heart
• with great precision
• with apparent ease

Money is just marks on paper. Music starts out that way too. The difference is that the bank can't take away the stuff you get from music.

(Nevertheless, more money is always better than less money.)

You don't have to have all the answers as long as you have a general idea of what the questions are.

Cynical doesn't equal sophisticated. Enthusiastic doesn't equal naive.

If you're looking for attention, "Bother", "Rats", and "Phooey" are better bets than more conventional obscenities.

It's never too early or too late to learn another instrument.

Everyone always speaks in code. If you pay attention, they'll give you their code book.

Even if you proofread and proofread again, it's still possible to produce a "Thrid Quarter Report" so you might as well relax and not be such a perfectionist.

Music is best heard from the inside.

There's no such thing as too much garlic.

n.b. Several of these things I can't yet claim to have learned from him. Maybe someday.

(This is a version of something I wrote for him for his birthday many years ago. I was going to wait and post it on his birthday this year, but time is hanging heavily on my hands tonight and I'm impatient. So happy un-birthday, Dad!)