just listening to rosa passos sing makes me happy

The hubby is a couple of years older than I am. More than a couple, actually. The year that I was sentenced to sit in the No No Chair for talking too much in Miss Pat's kindergarten class he was a hotshot senior with a crew cut who lettered in basketball and danced with girls in poodle skirts (the girls were in poodle skirts). It was 1957 and the music was great and the world was headed in pretty much the right direction, by God. When I graduated from high school thirteen years later Buddy Holly and God were famously dead and Elvis had turned into a total jerk. So we come from different cultures, the old man and I. And it keeps life interesting when it's not destroying any possibility for human communication whatsoever.

Take the 50th Reunion of the Class of '57, for example. It's a small class - maybe 90 folks - from a mostly agricultural area in a little town called Seymour, WI. (Or as Jim's dad used to say - "see more, know less." He strongly suggested his offspring try their wings in bigger vistas.) For the occasion, they'd reserved the 14th floor terrace of a very groovy event center a stone's throw from the hallowed Lambeau Field in Green Bay. It's a venue that has hosted Rod Stewart and Cher in the recent past. The night of the event it was showcasing The Famous Lipizzaner Stallions of Austria. I had never heard of them before. But I could see why they might be famous in some circles. They were massive, elegant creatures who had had the bejeesus trained out of them so that they could execute weirdly unhorselike maneuvers. They could kick, for instance, like drum majorettes. And they could skip! Plus they were dramatically, breathtakingly, pure white!

The hors d'oeuvres were equally impressive. Every fabulous little party morsel was there: grilled shrimp wrapped in prosciutto, stuffed mushrooms, deviled eggs, fresh fruit, spanakopita, and more, PLUS the piece de resistance, individual beef wellingtons! It was shaping up to be a very swell evening indeed with the stallions and the baby wellies and the beauty of the terrace in early evening.

But I sensed Jim was not in the happy place I was. As class president he'd been asked to prepare a few remarks and I knew he was frantically scanning his hard drive for useful data - nicknames, funny stories, wry observations on life between then and now. A hurried half hour spent rifling through the the 1956 and 1957 Ripper yearbooks had seeded some ideas but they were perilously fragmented and jotted in only the sketchiest fashion on a little hardware store tablet tucked into his shirt pocket. With some amusement he had noted that the class motto "One Step At A Time. Always Forward" pretty much captured the earthbound, quotidian pulse of life in Seymour. For the Class of 1957, no exhortation to dream, to reach for the stars, to discover the cure for cancer or solve world poverty. Instead a rallying cry to go slow, in one direction. Somehow that would be the flavor of his address to his classmates. How dopey it was then. How constrained by modesty and convention. How far they'd traveled to come to this place in their lives fifty years later. It wasn't all worked out. But it would probably come together when he was actually up there and everyone had mellowed out with conversation and a few drinks and the great food.

Just as our small talk was lapping the same punchlines the guy with the car dealership took his place at the microphone and started the introductions. In time honored fashion each classmate in turn awkwardly stood and said who they were and how many offspring they'd produced and what they'd been doing for the last million years. Most of them hadn't been doing much. They were nice folks, they were decent folks, they were good citizens, and they were farmers or clerks or housewives, with a few exceptions. They all had children with children. Some of their children's children had children.

It took a while to get all the way around the room. By the time the introductions were over and it was time for Jim to go to the podium, the sun was mostly set. I watched him accept the mike from Harold and step behind the lectern, his figure a silhouette against the skyline. I knew in an instant he was in trouble. There was no reading light for him. And his cheaters were somewhere in the hotel room seventeen miles away. Unable to read his notes and facing a sea of strange faces he defaulted to an opening line about the class motto. "One step at a time" he said. "Always forward." The silence was deafening. A better woman than I was would have cued the ironic chuckle that he needed. But this crowd was not into irony. This crowd was listening earnestly for the point. That he was going. To make. What? Too long married, I sweated with him through the horrible old people jokes that he gamely dragged out of the only part of his brain that was not completely whited out. I pretended to be annoyed when a really offensive line about saggy breasts got a laugh. But in the weird world of panic, I was proud that he got any reaction at all. Amazingly he held on. Both the wings fell off his little craft. The fuselage had a gaping hole in it. And there was fire leaping out of the cockpit when he landed a torturous interval later. Here's the thing, though. He never bailed. And that is so Class of '57!

"I SAID," she blared, "A PERSON COULD MAKE SHADOW PUPPETS ON THE WALLS IN HERE!" My mother was at her wit's end. Dad wasn't hearing her early morning ramblings. He wasn't hearing much of anything. The plane ride to our Florida cottage had temporarily jammed his always delicate audio so that even his hearing aids were useless. He'd spent the week deftly mimicking normal conversation in a one-sided sort of way. He could tell, he said, whether the sounds coming out of the faces around him were friendly or not. Friendly sounds got a nod and a pleasantry. More serious conversation required some cooperation – mainly strenuous attention to volume and articulation on the part of the conversee. The effort involved served as a kind of content editor – there could be no subtle exchanges about the meaning of life, for instance. Declarative statements amplified best. All of which painfully cramped the freewheeling whimsy that is my mother's trademark style.

In stentorian tones she continued "LIKE CHARADES! A PERSON COULD PLAY A GAME WITH SHADOW PUPPETS!" Dad knew some kind of gauntlet was being thrown down. He stumbled over to the dresser to find his superfluous hearing aids. "I'm not the man you married," he parried plaintively. "I can't hear you. The goddamned hearing aids. The plane ride. The rainy weather. The fluorescent light in the bathroom. The cold floor. The turn signal on the Lumina. The one-ply toilet paper." My mother was unappeased. She has long believed that my father is only pretending to get old to irritate her. "Descended from kings" she hissed to me to explain his obliviousness as we hustled around him after surgery once. "Oh for heaven's sake, Ralph," she muttered as she stomped out of the room.

I lay in bed in the room next to theirs reviewing the rules for a game of Charades. Book title. Three words. Third word Dragon. My Father's Dragon! Bingo!

My smart and beautiful sister-in-law is totally a big city girl except when she is being the most inquisitive and fearless of naturalists. She and her husband left Boston after decades of careers and kids and moved to the edge of the intelligent world in the tiniest of towns on the Florida coast. She kayaks around the endless waterways in the area and collects creatures to bring home to her kitchen aquarium. It's ok if they're slimy. She makes a terrific white bean dip and an unbelievable key lime pie involving cream cheese. She's thrown herself into volunteer work with the elderly and with the local humane society. We have in common that we both read lots of books and frequently have similar reactions to them. So she was loving Joan Didion's marvelous book about the agony of losing her husband and tending to a critically ill daughter – The Year of Magical Thinking. The thing about the book is how it sort of parses the love of the long-married. A couple of years after reading it I still quote the widow's poignant discovery that while married to John she'd never aged. In him, to him, with him, she was always the 28 year old woman she'd been when their love was new. In his absence she saw herself for the first time as the rest of the world saw her – with all her wrinkles, her frailties, no longer beautiful. It's a wonderful book about love and loss and Trish sent me an email about it at the time she was reading it:

I'm mostly through Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, and when Will asked for a synopsis over coffee this morning, I fumbled for a toehold - where to start? "Her husband died suddenly... "I offered. At which point Will asked what would I do? "Not enough caffeine yet to answer," I pleaded. "And you?" "Oh," he replied, "I'd sell the house, get a condo."

It was the most beautiful day in the history of the world. Jim and I were walking in the Marin Headlands overlooking San Francisco Bay. Our marriage had been a little rocky of late and the trip to California was meant to be healing. The scenery was spectacular and I could feel myself falling truly madly deeply in love with everything one celled and up. The oceanic feeling was upon me and I turned to Jim as we approached the edge of the rugged outcropping. I wanted to say something fabulous. Something about love and humanity and the whole excellence of consciousness. But he beat me to the moment. Putting his arm around me tenderly and gesturing toward the loveliness of the view that lay beyond the scary precipice he said:" If you fell off the edge there? You'd go ploppity, ploppity, ploppity. All the way down."