Archives 2016

Darling Sylvia,  Thank you for helping me shake the seasonal blues.  I had returned to my dark place.  In that pit, I grieved for the loss of dad thirty-six years ago and this year’s loss of important Better Marriage stalwarts Roberta, Jim and J.P.  You did not belittle my grief but reminded of J.P.’s pledge to keep on keeping on.

I just finished a wonderfully cold, windy, sunshine blessed tour of campus.  I could not help myself; I was glad to be alive.   I passed the Falany Performing Arts Center and realized it would not be there if Judy Mac had not come back from Houston to spend her life investing in her students.  I rounded the building and looked across Lake Mullenix at the Fincher Art Center and thought that it would not be there if Curtis had not decided to stay put.  I walked to the chapel and through the trees spotted the new Dobbs science addition.  It stands because, in 1988, I decided not to go back into  industry at Exxon.  My students needed me more than I needed my anger. What we did with our lives at Reinhardt University was worthy.

We still have work.  I need to work with you in loving our children and grandchildren and our faith and marriage enrichment families. Having you beside me has pulled me out of my self-indulgence.   We need to keep on keeping on and, in the process, leave our loved ones with a little less pain and a little more joy. This new year will add new steps to our dance and new joys to share.

Love You Much – Eddie Bert

Dear Eddie, Let’s talk about living out loud. We are a little frayed by recent heavy stuff—heavy good and heavy sad. We are grateful for the couples who have lived their lives out loud in front of us.

People love weddings. But, after couples get married, they are left on their own to learn how to be married. Forty years ago, we were blessed with a supportive marriage enrichment community. Precious friends near and far have shared their living with us–their happiness, their worries, their challenges, their laughter, their frustrations, their essentials. Their sometimes eloquent and sometimes hard plain statements have become touchstones for us. Their living informed our living. They have lived, and, yes, some of them have died, out loud.

Our friends’ living out loud offered us a range of emotions, wishes, viewpoints and possibilities that we did not have on our own. We have faced little in our marriage that has not been somehow previewed by others going before us. When we face new challenges, we have resources. Because these special couples broke the “keep it to yourself” marital taboo, we feel less alone and, certainly, less crazy.

Thank you for being open to growing together. Thank you for listening with me to all the people who have lived and are living their lives out loud.

Loving you (out loud)

Sylvia

Darling Sylvia,  Loving in the Now.   Back in 1966, we began dreaming about what the future would hold.  Were we going to be together forever? How would we make a living?  Where would we live?  What would our family be like?  We had no past, the present was sometimes overwhelming, and the future was full of  scary unknowns.  I discovered Ed Ames while we were living in our little house on Sharon Avenue in Prospect Park in Minneapolis.   The words touched my soul; I cried at the thought of a life together, well loved.

When the snow is on the roses
When the summer stars are gone
One more summer will be over
But our love will still go on

Our life together with its moves, jobs, and ups and downs has been a journey.  Our commitment to to keep talking with each other has meant that we learned to plan and flex to a degree  we never thought possible.  Now, my hair is white like the snow, and that dreamed of future is our cherished past.   I still love you, and you still love me. …. Eddie B.

Dear Eddie, Letting Go is hard, especially when I am not sure what I am hanging on to. I am sure this problem applies to things, to behaviors, and even to dreams. It is not the first time I have had this problem.  Before I can let something go, I need to name it.

This truth was most recently pointed out to me by a Telephone. We have wavered for years about disconnecting the land line at our Michigan lake house. The excuse has been that cell service was terrible there, and we needed the house phone for emergencies. We have indeed had emergencies there when I was glad for a house phone. Likewise, we did have to go to the dock or hug the picture window in order to get a cell connection. Hassles with the phone company twice yearly about moving the phone on and off of Vacation, and paying too much for the few weeks of service we needed were a royal pain. You would say, “Get rid of it.” I would make the call to do so, and waver again. So, why was I holding on?

It looked like I was holding on to telephone service. I was holding on to a black rotary telephone that sat on the telephone table of my childhood. It wasn’t even the actual phone we had; our phone like it gave way to a Touchtone Princess Phone and a kitchen Wall Phone—still ancient of days. But this table sat in the upstairs hall at home beside the laundry chute. I dragged the phone around the corner into my room for privacy, tucking the cord under the door, sitting backed up in a corner. And, yes, talking with you, never long enough, when we were separated in the summer.

What finally came to me and made me cry was that I was holding on to a sound. The phone at the lake had mechanical bells that jangled. When you said ‘hello,’ the vibrations could still be felt in the air and heard by the caller on the other end of the line.  You could hear that phone ring all the way down on the dock. That sound belonged to a another time.  Saying forever ‘goodbye’ to the sound and the time it represented made me cry. Still does- right now.

I disconnected the land line. I am letting go of another physical piece of my childhood and youth. I can smile through the tears because I have named the loss.  I can relegate the ring of a rotary phone to sweet memory. Now, I will need to apply the learning the next time that I find myself hanging on a little too hard to something. When I am being a little too much of a hard head,  I will ask myself what I am holding so tightly. I will ask for your help. Thanks for listening to me and not laughing at me. Love, Sylvia

Darling Sylvia,   Thank you for being my cheerleader. I have an ambiguous relationship with raccoons.  In 1965, I worked for the Crawford County Road Commission as Restroom Attendant Badge #278.  I was in charge of the privies along I-75, M-72 and Old US 27 and also had responsibility for roadkill.   It was in my secondary responsibility that I met Rocky a mile south of the Big Wheel.  Following SOP, I stopped the truck and chose my tool.  I slipped the blade of my flat shovel under Rocky.  He  reared up, snarled and lunged for my arm.   What he said about my intelligence, as he scrambled through the underbrush,  made me blush.  Rocky was not my cheerleader.

I encountered Rocky II on the side of Hubberston Road as you and I returned from Papa John’s farm.  I  needed  an animal skin to pass  Dr. Eyer’s Zoology class.  I  parked ahead of the animal’s body and  based on my previous training approached the body carefully. I nudged the carcass, and she rolled over and  glared at me.  I returned to the trunk of the Pontiac, removed a tire iron and claimed my prize.  Our ride back to campus was  quiet. My city mouse bride to be did not appreciate this country boy’s skill set.  Neither you nor Rocky II were my cheerleader.

Last week you discovered Rocky III,  a forty pound dead male raccoon. He was fifteen yards downhill from the front door of our lake cottage.  You refilled my coffee and quietly informed me that we had a problem. I threw rocks at the creature hoping he would run off – he didn’t.  I procrastinated as long as I could,  got up, searched for a shovel and applied my job skills of long ago. I dug the grave in the gravel and peat and dragged him by the tail to his resting place.  A cloud of flies followed as his pallbearers.  You were my cheerleader.  You stood by with extra tools, kept me company, and expressed your appreciation out loud. In our marriage, we have learned that there are moments when praise from our partner for stepping out our comfort zone for the good of the we is essential.    Love you,  Eddie  Bert

Dear Eddie,  Different views yield different fruit. It’s June, and you and I are picking blueberries. If we escape a freeze in April and we have rain, we have berries at this time every year. I like picking with you in the early mornings or the cool of the evenings. You work down the row or across the bushes from me. I can hear you move and see your shadow. It occurs to me that picking berries, especially with the two of us picking together, is very like our living together in our marriage.

In our marriage and in picking berries, we both have viewpoints. You can see berries up high and outside; I can look at the same plant and find berries inside, low down, and from up-side down. We both can think that we have clean-picked, walk back, and, from another angle or in another light, there are more berries. Even after we have both done our best picking, the cups we both take to the house are mixtures of pink, green, blue and purple. Only after a day of “blueing up” in pans on the counter do the berries approach “blueberry” color and attain their ripe sweetness.

As we celebrate our 47^th wedding anniversary, I am so happy that we learned to listen to each other.  Your views give me alternate perspectives, alternate possibilities. They give me comfort, encouragement, pause, and lots of laughter. I usually try to share my views in ways that are honoring of you. As we share and let our views sit together, we sometimes agree on one view. Often we come to a joint view that is altogether new. We have had adventures, laughter, and tears. Our life together continues to be a blast. I’m so glad you asked me to dance so many years ago at Alma.

Happy Anniversary! I love you dearly.

Sylvia

Darling Sylvia,  For thirty years at Reinhardt University I taught my biology students that the primary organs for listening are the ears.  You have, however,  taught me that the primary organ of  listening to you is my heart. Unfortunately,  I was a slow learner, but it is possible.  At the 50^th reunion of the Class of 65,  Richard Smith remembered that Coach Smith spent two hours teaching me the one move of my senior year (a reverse pivot to the baseline = reverse pivot, one dribble middle, spin baseline, shoot – right …).  It has taken  much longer for you to teach me to listen with my heart. I sit down opposite you, look into your eyes, bracket your knees (knee to knee) with mine and listen with my heart.  First of all,  I ask you what are you feeling.   I must,  although it is very hard for me, shut up and listen for your feelings with my heart.  Listening with my heart is a learned skill.  It is like that  reverse pivot to the baseline but it has taken longer to learn.

The other night,  friends said that they had been together so long that they knew automatically what the other was thinking and feeling.  Alarm bells rang in my head.  You have been my friend and lover for nearly fifty years. You are not the 19 year old that drove me crazy.  You are more gracious, generous, kind and beautiful now than you were then.  We both have changed and are changing all of the time. I listen to you with my heart instead of with my ears because I care and profoundly  respect you. Listening with the heart gives me a complete,  accurate and up-to-date information base.   It builds a safe place where you and I have the chance to be heard and understood in the now.  Listening with the heart allows a shared meaning of our experiences, a place of togetherness.

You knock my socks off.

Eddie Bert

Dear Eddie,

There is no time to waste; no threat, just fact. Neither of us is sick; life is good. But, we have less days of life to spend than when we first began. I am grateful that our friends Alice and Lee with Better Marriages North Carolina gave us the opportunity to update our Marriage Mission Statement. As we talked, with the background murmur of other couples writing their statements, I had a gut level recognition of a change. We wrote our Statement on March 8, 1997. I am so glad we did write it down. We have reevaluated it repeatedly. We have always agreed; it has always fit, and we didn’t need a new one. This time the tone and urgency had changed.

To live our lives as darling companions, honoring our past, living zestfully in the present, and looking forward to the future in joyous confidence that our intimacy will only grow deeper

In the almost 20 years since we wrote those words, we have lived life fully, and that life has become part of the past to be honored. We have learned to more consciously enjoy the present. Now, in our legacy phase of life, as lovers and marriage partners, as parents and as grandparents, as friends, and as marriage enrichment leaders, our call is be even more congruent in our living of the best of our values.  Thank you for the important conversations. Thank you for sharing life with me. We can add more emphasis to our statement with these new words:

And may we leave others with a little less pain, a little less loneliness, and a little more joy. May those who come behind us find us faithful.

Always,

Sylvia

Darling Sylvia,

I remember sitting in the truck at Lumberjack Park and talking for hours about who we were and what our future would be like.  We both understood that we were strong personalities.  We were sure we would love our way through the fact that we were both lead horses.  Some of our adult (21 year old) wisdom was right on the money.  One thing we missed in our in-love hormonal haze was that you were indeed a lead horse but I was really a jackass.

It took me another forty years to join the two phrases “I am sorry,” and  “I was wrong.“ During our years of marriage, there have been times when the we would have been better off if I could have said the couplet without choking.  In more recent years, I am trying to learn a second couplet, “Please forgive me“ and “What can I do to make it right?“  I still have some time to unlearn the old ways and learn new ways.  Let’s grow this marriage together.

Yours,   Eddie B.

Dear Eddie,
Thank you for our weekend road trip. I heard a woman say those words at the gym the other day, and I thought, “That is just what we need!” Our road trips are great! Sometimes, they have destinations; other times, we just go and see where we land. They may be short or long. Always, I enjoy the quiet “in the moment” time with you punctuated by the sharing of what we see and the remembering of past experiences. I continue to cherish moments with just you, looking ahead side by side.

An afternoon trip to see Grandpa and Aunt Nellie on the farm—big kids, a couple, away from the campus. The crystal palace of Minnehaha Falls. Eagles on the ice at Red Wing. Migrating birds at Point Pelee. Sandhills. Catfish heads on fence posts. Glacier lilies in the snow. And pink lady slippers. Ice fog on everything at Clingman’s Dome. “Oh, look-a Ruby-crowned Kinglet.” And, spring after spring, the red maples foretelling the redbud and dogwood to come. And, “Do you remember?” It is glue for you and me.

Thank you for staying in touch with me. When we are “caught up” on the “work” of life and marriage, we are free to enjoy revitalizing play together. Even when we do have some of that “work” talk to do on the road, it feels like teamwork instead of a chore.

Looking ahead side by side.

Let’s make time to road trip often.

Love, Sylvia