Here a celebration.... there a celebration....

There is sort of a pile up of personal days of importance in our extended family during the last full week of June, in addition to Father's Day.

My parents were married on June 21, 1945, which makes this year their 64th year together.



Pictures of couples who have been married a long time frequently appear in the newspaper when children have special anniversary parties for them. Often they look rather miserable in their pictures. I love how happy mom and dad look. It has been year of triumphs and setbacks for them. My mom takes 3 steps forward in her recovery and then 2 steps back. My dad has taken marvelous care of her.

This is one of my favorite pictures of them, taken within a year or so of their marriage.



My father was in the Navy, and the ship he was sailing on made a brief stop San Francisco for minor repairs. My mother went up to meet him. And there they are, walking down a street in San Francisco. I think it must have been a foggy day. The street looks shiny beneath their feet.

They exemplify to me the Saint-Exupery's line...

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction

And Anne Morrow Lindberg's elaboration:

A good relationship has a pattern like a dance built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate, but swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart's.

Moving confidently forward.... toward the unknown. They didn't know that over the next 14 years they would have 4 children together....


who would grow up to be these people....


Who would, in turn, fall in love, get married, and produce 4 children...

I would have a son....

My brother would have a daughter (on the left), and then my sister would have two daughters.

And that the last of these grandchildren - Little Hunny, the young woman on the right - would have her birthday on the very day of her grandparents' wedding anniversary. And although it is a bit of a stretch to make this a coincidence, for her 19th birthday celebration she went to San Francisco, without her momma!

And then at the end of the week... yesterday in fact, it was our anniversary.


We have now been married 38 years.



I like another thing Anne Morrow Lindbergh has to say...

We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

Some couples grow apart after they marry. I am so thankful that my parents have grown together. I am so thankful Richard and I have grown together. I hope we continue to do so...