Author: Eddie

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

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.

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

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

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.

Darling Sylvia,

At 5:50 AM, I got up and let out the cat. I took my pills and put on the coffee.  I called to the kids to get up. Paper bowls, napkins, and three spoons were retrieved from their hiding places. Kid cereal, milk and orange drink were placed on the table, and I again called to the kids to get their butts out of bed. The kids were fed and out the door by 6:52.  At 7:05, I took Aryn’s hand in mine and led all three across the highway to the door of Ms Lisa’s bus.  At 7:08, I returned home and cuddled you down for an early morning nap. At 8:22, I petted Peter the cat, and you awoke.  We started another busy day of retirement (it’s not like what we had imagined). “Sunrise sunset, sunrise sunset, swiftly flow the years. One season following another, laiden with happiness and  tears.” You lay against me, your head on my shoulder.   You were asleep,  peaceful, and oh so beautiful.  Like Tevye,  I marveled that after all these years  you still love me, and I didn’t even have to ask you. There are tear tracks on my cheeks.  I’m allergic to cats.

Love you more than Nutter Butters,

Eddie B.

Darling Sylvia,

Last Monday, I had my second cataract removed. I had been told by a friend that after her surgery it was like living in high definition (HD). I am now a believer. The colors are incredible, glasses are gone, and I can once again read the fine print. I think clarity is the word I am searching for.

Looking ahead to the next year is part of our search for clarity as individuals and as a couple. It’s important to reflect on where we were and where we want to be. We celebrate our successes; mourn our losses, but, more importantly, plan for the coming year. We don’t always get what we want but we get much closer to our goals because we speak the words and listen to each other with our hearts. What do I want for me? What do you want for you? What do we want for us? What will we do in the next six months to a year to help get us where we want to go? It’s time to be intentional. It is time for a Marriage Growth Plan for this year.

Individually list, and then combine lists:
Three things you want for yourself

Three things you want for your mate

Three things you want for your marriage

Now, make a plan together knee to knee.
Include goals for short term (two week), mid term (6 month),long term (a year)

Include steps for each, and responsibilities for the steps.

Make dates to evaluate along the way. Put those dates on your calendars.

__________________________ ______________________
Sign, date, and seal with a kiss.

Dearest Sylvia,

I can remember when and where I stole my first kiss from you. It was 49 years ago in front of Newberry Hall after the Delt Sig hayride. You said, “I don’t kiss on the first date,” and I laughed and replied, “Well I do.” I remember your taste—peaches–and the warmth of your lips. I have never regretted that brash move. In this busy Christmas week, let’s try adding at least one one minute kiss into this week’s daily routine. I will let you count the seconds. Remember when we tried a one minute kiss in the Wyoming Snowy Range? We could not make a full 10 seconds without a breath. Some geology professor–I had forgotten about the effects of altitude on the oxygen content of air.

Mistletoe (Phoradendron leucarpum) is used as an excuse to kiss the special ones in our lives. Dr. Oz and the magazines are prescribing kissing as a way to wake up and energize marriages. My primary love language is touch, and I like the idea. We can cost the kisses out as a medical expense (exercising my new nose) on this year’s income tax. I take enjoyment of you as a wonderful gift intended by God for pleasure and for reaffirming our bond no matter how long we have been married. At this time of year, I have once again hung mistletoe in our kitchen doorway and on the front porch hoping to intercept you.

Love you,

Eddie Bert

Note to my granddaughters – Papa Eddie’s advice does not apply to you and, if any boy tries to steal a kiss, tell me immediately.

Note to Couple Friends –

Where was your first kiss?

Are there other memorable kisses?

Find some Mistletoe and make one.

Darling Sylvia,

 In the boys’ dormitory at 501 Ottawa Street, Grayling, Michigan, a manly nose which recorded a history of past events was a family trademark to be treasured. I was taught by Joe and Johnny that we were rugged ugly and that pain was to be endured with stoic manliness. Tears would only invoke ridicule. As a result, I shed no tears when I broke my nose during my freshman year of football or when my nose met Chris Kroll’s elbow in 1963 during a basketball scrimmage between the JVs (me) and the Varsity (him). Copious blood but no tears followed. My previous experience when Dr. Blaha packed my first break made me decide to reset my own. The resulting pain and lack of skill in setting it helped convince me that botany and geology rather than medicine would become my eventual career path. The upper reaches of my nose carried a reminder of Chris that resembled the old ski jump at Hanson’s Hills.

In the Grayling dorm, our bodies were not considered temples but fortresses. My fortress served me without a care until the arrival in the mail at the age of fifty of my invitation to join ARRP. That invitation marked the first cracks in the walls of my fortress. At that very moment of the hated junk mail’s arrival, the first symptoms appeared that indicated that benign bilateral enlargement of my prostate was occurring. At fifty-eight, a cardiac syncope and a pacemaker destroyed the drawbridge entering into my fortress. At sixty-two, a plunge from our lake cottage balcony resulted in a smashed hip. The entire north wall of the fortress began to crumble. At sixty-three, a hernia in my groin was repaired by a robot inserted of all places through my belly button. That breached the south wall of my fort. At sixty-eight, in response to a chronic rosacea infection, the sebaceous tissue under the skin of my nose proliferated into benign growths (rhinophyma) that changed my face into the winner of the Freddy Kruger look-alike contest. It became obvious to everyone, except me, that something needed to be done. You took action on my behalf. This morning, I looked in the mirror; I have a new nose. It is still a manly big nose but it lacks the ski jump at the top. The tip and nares were given shape as a gift of the extra cartilage from Chris’s elbow. I think it is the first time since 1963 that so much air has entered my lungs via my nose. Sylvia, in 1969 you heard the part of the marriage vows dealing with sickness and health. Thank you for taking them seriously. I never would have thought that my nose was included. Unlike the kid who got his two front teeth for Christmas, I got a new nose

Love you,
Eddie Bert

Darling Sylvia,

On October 10, I celebrated 50 years of knowing you were in my world. On the dance floor of the Country Club of Detroit (the GPHS 50th Reunion), we danced the box social, the twist, the truck stop and everything in between. I love to watch you dance. Your joy radiates on your face and, oh darling, your body looks so good. You let me be your rooster, and I strut and preen knowing you are my hen. Not PC but I am so proud that you chose to be my trophy wife.

Like a dance, life with you has been very good. Sometimes, it has been like the twist very exciting and dangerous. Sometimes, we dance apart but always we know where the other is. Sometimes, it is like the box social, a coordination of being close and then apart but always in step; I am sorry for stepping on your toes. Sometimes, it is like the truck stop with your head resting on my shoulder and the curve of your body so close that I can feel the beating of your heart. I am so glad that you said yes when I asked you to dance.

Love,

Eddie