I SEE MY PARENTS STANDING

I SEE MY PARENTS STANDING

I see my parents standing in the middle of the hot, crowded room. It is their 50th wedding anniversary and it’s a surprise party for them. My mother, who suffers constantly with rheumatoid arthritis and sometimes can hardly walk, has been standing and talking and smiling for nearly three hours. My father, who usually is a table-hopper and loves to work the crowd has been by her side the whole time. Not touching but very close.

It really is my father’s party in many ways. Other than my family and my sister’s family and my mother’s sister and her husband, all the rest of the people are my father’s relatives, my father’s friends. My mother moved to my father’s town when she married him and it has continued to be his town, not hers, for fifty years.

“As soon as you girls are grown I’m going to leave that man”, she’d say to us girls when we were young. Usually on a day after he hadn’t come home until the middle of the night, drunk and hoping she wouldn’t be mad again. From my point of view, my mother spent most of her married life mad and upset with her husband, my father. And he spent a lot of time steering clear of her anger, only to invite it again on the following Saturday.

So it was striking to see them together like this, holding court with all the young and old people who had come out to honor them and their marriage, or at least the longevity of it.

And even more striking when my father left my mother’s side for a few minutes to have a bathroom break, and my mother finished her conversation with Aunt Agnes, and turning toward the spot where my father had been all afternoon, said

“Where’s my Joe?”