Married, Fifty-Four Years

My lovely wife, the love of my life, is fast asleep in our bed.  There is an anniversary card for me on the table next to me.  When she wakes tomorrow, I will have left for Best Friends Animal Society to help care for rescued cats.  I will have left a card for her.  It will be our 54th wedding anniversary.  Cards can’t possibly describe how much we love each other, but still we search the greeting card rack for ones that come close.  We won’t be buying any expensive gifts but we have tickets to see Singin’ in the Rain, the musical at the Hale Theater, then reservations for dinner at an Italian restaurant we like.   It is a simple way to celebrate the most important thing in our life.

When we lived in California, we had a sign over our bedroom door … it said Grow Old with Me, the Best is Yet to Be.  We’ve never put it up in our home in Utah.   The things we’ve dealt with since we got here … cancer, COVID, arthritis, and gradual decline we’ve both experience as we move through our seventies … made hanging it seem dishonest.  But here is the thing.  There is no place else I would rather be than by the side of Muriel Steingard Reed and I know she feels the same way about me.   She is the love of my life and travelling this path together makes the difficult times easier and the good times, well, maybe the best of times.  So maybe the sign is right after all.

Best Days

This is a repost from 2013 when I was posting favorites every Friday.   I’m feeling nostalgic this morning so I thought I’d post it again.  It’s one of my favorite favorites.

There are certain movies I can watch over and over again … it drives Muri crazy. Most of the films aren’t great films, although I do hold the North American record for viewings of The Godfather. My favorites are usually romantic and each has a scene I love: Sally Albright faking an orgasm in a busy restaurant in When Harry Met Sally; Ronnie Camereri and Loretta Castorini at the opera in Moonstruck; Bill Johnson, the soda jerk, discovering color and art in Pleasantville; Phil Connors gradually learning to be human by living Groundhog Day again and again. In Billy Crystal’s City Slickers, as Mitch, Phil and Ed are driving the herd from New Mexico to Colorado, Mitch talks about his Best Day, a trip to Yankee Stadium with his father.

Fifty-Two Years

I have no recollection of what I did on the day before I married Muriel Steingard, the woman that is the best thing that ever happened to me. I am told that the day of the wedding I nervously talked everyone’s ear off on the way to Temple Sinai for the ceremony. I don’t remember being nervous, but that probably means I was nervous the day before, too.

This year on the day before our 52nd Wedding Anniversary, I accompanied her to the Jordan Valley Cancer Center for her second chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer. It has been that kind of year. On her birthday last month she had the chemo port surgically implanted in her shoulder. In years past, we’d have planned a mini-vacation or special date to celebrate but even if there were not cancer treatments, COVID-19 has put the kibosh on any real celebration in this strangest year of our 52 together. Since it is uncertain how she will feel on the 11th … and because we need to be especially careful about exposure during treatment … I made dinner at home on Sunday night; filet Mignon, baked potato and creamed corn. We ate in the dining room and put flowers on the table. It was nice. Tomorrow we will take it easy and, as they say, play it by ear.

The thing about this star-crossed anniversary is that it puts everything in perspective. There is no place on earth I would rather be than by my wife’s side as she goes through this. And there is no better anniversary present than the positive prognosis for her complete recovery. The way we care for each other during her treatment … and make no mistake, I need special care, too … is what love and fifty-two years of marriage is all about. There will be other years and anniversary celebrations to come, but this one will always be memorable, the year we walked through the unthinkable together. I love you, Muri, more than ever. Happy Anniversary.

Fifty

Fifty three years ago, I met the Love of My Life. Unfortunately, she was dating my best friend. Fortunately, she stopped seeing him because he wasn’t Jewish. Unfortunately, neither was I. Fortunately, she thought my last name was Green (could be Jewish) not Reed (not Jewish) (Catholic, actually). I was taken with her looks, her spirit, the way her smile and laugh lit up a room (and me). She was taken with me but didn’t know it yet. We broke up several times to please her parents and yet I persisted. A roommate told me I was digging my own grave. My senior year of college, she took my fraternity pin … surely a silly college ritual yet my Best Day, the day she said she’d be mine. We were married in a small ceremony at a reformed temple in Stamford, Connecticut on August 11, 1968, making today our fiftieth wedding anniversary.

Anniversary Songs

If you’ve been coming around Older Eyes, Bud’s Blog for a while, you know he loves music.   His life has a soundtrack of thousands of tunes, tied to good memories and bad.  Mrs. Eyes (also known as Muri to my Bud) is not the music lover her husband is but our 50 year marriage (tomorrow) still has a soundtrack of love songs.   I thought I’d post a few today in preparation for the big day.

Our courtship began with coffee dates at The Campus Restaurant at the University of Connecticut.  This was likely playing on the jukebox and it still takes me back:

Solitude

Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you – Kahlil Gibran On Marriage in The Prophet

Occasionally, when I mention how long my wife and I have been together (over fifty years), someone asks, What is your secret?  The answer of course, is that there is no secret, except perhaps that the best of relationships take commitment and work.  I suppose that doesn’t qualify as a secret either because it’s mentioned in virtually every self-help book ever written on the fine art of marriage.   There are, however, many factors that contributed to our long run together and one of those is that we both need time alone and, because we both need our Solitude, we are both willing to give it to each other.  Oh, it’s not perfect.   If one of us is feeling needy or just in need of company and the other there can be hurt feelings or reluctant compromises, but what marriage doesn’t have those?  In our Solitude, we pursue interests of our own, some which require uninterrupted contemplation, and we consider with the perspective that only solitude can bring the decisions to made in our life.   It probably sounds enigmatic, but I believe that in part the divisiveness and misunderstanding that plagues our society these days stems in part from too little time spent alone in quiet contemplation and the lack of self-knowledge that results from continual engagement with others.

Can You Believe … 49?

We have a group of four couples that we go out for dinner with for Christmas.  They are all friends we made when we moved into our first house in 1972.  We see each other sporadically during the year but Christmas is the only time we go out as a group.   One of the remarkable things about this group is that we have almost 200 years of marriage between us.   My wife, Muri, and I are doing our part with our 49th anniversary today.  Given our fairly long courtship at the University of Connecticut, we have known each other for 53 years.  Looking back at the immature, arrogant young man I was at 21, I have to believe I had some guidance in choosing her to be my wife.  Perhaps there’s some truth to the Jewish notion of a Basheert,  the name of the woman a man will marry announced by a voice from heaven 40 days he is born – literally a match made in heaven.

Grow Old with Me …

You probably know the rest … the Best is Yet to Be.  You may even know that the phrase is the first line of a poem by Robert Browning with the unlikely title of Rabbi Ben Ezra, a poem that is more philosophical and less romantic than the opening line suggests. You may know that a song of the same name … loosely based on Browning’s poem … was one of John Lennon’s last compositions.  Does it seem possible that the man who wrote Imagine wrote these lyrics?

Grow old along with me
The best is yet to be
When our time has come
We will be as one
God bless our love
God bless our love

Forty-Eight Years

As of today, Mr. and Mrs. Eyes (aka Muri and Bud) have been married for forty-eight years.   In case you were wondering, this is what a forty-eight year marriage looks like.   Yes, there were a few tough times but who takes pictures of those?   Besides, they were few and far between.

Happy Anniversary, Muri

Throwback Thursday – Falling or Climbing

Would you believe I have over 1800 posts here on Older Eyes – Bud’s Blog?   Maybe that’s why new post topics seem hard to come by.  At any rate, I’ve decided to repost my favorites on Throw Back Thursday.   This post, Falling and Climbing, was originally posted in 2009 then again in 2011.   It is about the true meaning of love, at least as I see it.  It is about what it really means to have a soulmate who challenges you to be the best person you can be, not one who is a reason to leave the relationship you are in.

My wife and I are friends with a couple who are about ten years older than we are … and who have been married ten years longer.    When they’re out together, they get those aren’t they a cute old couple looks.   People often ask them, “How can we have a marriage like yours?”    The answer is this –  “If you want to have what we have, you have to go through what we went through,” a response I liked enough to use in my toast at my daughter’s wedding.