going for gold

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On our flight to Oslo, Norway 4th of July weekend I read You Only Get Married for the First Time Once by Judy Markey, a light-hearted, satirical commentary on life and marriage. One passage that stood out to me was:

The best thing that Bill Veeck gave me, though, was a glimpse into extraordinary clean and unconfused loving. I have never seen a marriage like the one he and Mary Frances Veeck put together. I have never seen two people woven quite so tightly, so finely tuned, so visibly one, yet so private about some of their oneness. I have never seen that kind of mutual protection, mutual respect, that sense of actually being in concert with another person. I think Bill and Mary Frances Veeck did marriage and loving better than just about anyone I've ever known.

Her description is dazzling, I feel like I need to put sunglasses on haha Xo) Bill Veeck was a big baseball team owner with a lot of personality apparently (I looked him up on good ol' wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Veeck), and Mary Frances was actually his second wife. I wish I could ask Judy more about what she saw in Bill and Mary. Not knowing a lot of couples closely enough perhaps, I can pick out one or two very strong and exemplary marriages but none that quite live up the glowing picture Judy painted. I think the skeptic in us all would like to say it can't exist, it's too intimidating and challenging an ideal. But can't we hope to go a little farther if we set the bar a little higher? Maybe not worrying about being so ONE, so fined tuned yet perhaps, but maybe working on that mutual protection and respect, figuring out how he shows love and how he communicates in ways that are different (and thus OK) from you. And appreciating him for it. You'll really earn that bronze anniversary.

You never know, after 50 years you might even grab the gold =)

"We feasted on love; every mode of it, solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. She was my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress, but at the same time all that any man friend has ever been to me."
C.S. Lewis on his wife, Joy