A marriage that began today in 1948 / An extended meditation on our parents and their long marriage

Our parents married on December 4, 1948. Our father was 34 years old. Our mother was 32 years old. Both had been married before and had to get special permission from a bishop to marry again in the Episcopal Church. When I was 17 years old, my mother told me that she had been married before. What a shock that was. We didn't know that our father had been married before until after our mother died. I don't know when or where this photograph was taken, but my guess is that it is in 1948, when they were engaged. This photograph was among a carousel of slides that my father showed me a few years after my mother died suddenly in December of 1994, the day before their 46th wedding anniversary. My father died on St. Patrick's Day in 2003.

I can almost remember them being this young. I hadn't looked at these photos since the year our father died. Our parents are just getting to know each other. They are hopeful.

Here are our parents in the 1960s, at age 50 and 52, in a somewhat solemn photo and a laughing photo taken in a photography studio:












































and when they were in their 70s in the late 1980s in a photo taken by me:














Today I am feeling grateful for our parents-- our father with his gardens and his games of Solitaire and his world travels in retirement, our mother with her art work and her books and her cooking, our parents playing Scrabble, our parents enjoying life together for 20 years after we grew up--our mysterious and eccentric parents that I am only beginning to know now, in the years since they died.

With immense gratitude to Steve Jobs

Listen to "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" from 1964:

"... I gazed down in the river's mirror
And watched its winding strum
The water smooth ran like a hymn
And like a harp did hum

Lay down your weary tune, lay down
Lay down the song your strum
And rest yourself 'neath the strength of strings
No voice can hope to hum"

In 1979, when I was 29 years old (and had a different name), and personal computers were just coming up on the horizon, and I didn't want anything to do with them, I made the above linocut, inspired by a photo of Bob Dylan on the Basement Tapes album, never dreaming that Steve Jobs (another serious fan of Bob Dylan) would design a computer that would open up a world of creativity for me, including allowing me to compose a book of my art work and poetry and to self-publish it.

While I was out walking on the South Bay Trail along Bellingham Bay this morning, it occurred to me that the creative energy and gratitude in this song likely spoke to Steve Jobs.

If you have time, listen to this. I had heard this once before. It's worth listening to again.

A Birth and a Return and Picasso in November

Every Saturday morning at 7 a.m., I meet with friends for breakfast at a nearby restaurant. Today there was especially good news from three of the youngest. One announced the birth of his first child, a son. The other talked about a celebration the night before of the return of one of his friends from Afghanistan. Another spoke of his teenaged son's long-anticipated visit to the Picasso exhibit in Seattle. There was much talk of love and hope and gratitude from these young men in the midst of the many sorrows of our times.

Morning view from my yoga mat

A few days ago I dreamed that I was living near the California coast again after 37 years of being away. As I walked down a steep gravel path with the ocean to my right, I felt sunshine as well as deep joy and gratitude. I was not with anyone but I was not alone either. The water was an unusual dark jade green. Grey whales began to appear just below the surface of the ocean, followed by golden fish with almost human faces. Sea lions came out of the ocean to be touched. Finally, a group of ancient sea turtles arrived to look into the faces of all those who stood on the gravel path. I woke up in amazement but drifted back to sleep. As I was between sleeping and waking, I heard this:

"Half of it is gratitude. The other half is being the mayonnaise."