I Like Being Married: Treasured Traditions, Rituals, and Stories - Hardcover

 
9780385502313: I Like Being Married: Treasured Traditions, Rituals, and Stories
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385502311 ISBN 13: 9780385502313
Verlag: Doubleday, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

An eclectic anthology celebrates the institution of marriage in a collection of classic poetry, contemporary love letters, quotations, personal stories, humorous anecdotes, and reflections that includes the contributions of Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev, Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, Celine Dion, Willian Shakespeare, and others.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MICHAEL LEACH and THERESE J. BORCHARD are the editors of I Like Being Catholic. Michael Leach, the executive director of Orbis Books, has edited and published numerous award-winning books. He lives in Greenwich, Connecticut. Therese Borchard has written seventeen books, including Winging It: Meditations of a Young Adult and the acclaimed children’s books series The Emerald Bible Collection. She lives in Annapolis, Maryland.

Aus dem Klappentext

From the reflections of famous people and the stories of everyday folk to classic love letters and contemporary "ten best" lists, this delightfully eclectic treasury shines a spotlight on the many joys of marriage.
I Like Being Married is the ultimate celebration of the ties that keep loving couples together in good times and bad. With a guest list that includes Paul Newman and Joannne Woodward, Nancy and Ronald Reagan, Queen Victoria, George Burns, and Secretary of State Colin Powell (to name just a few); poetic tributes from Homer, Shakespeare, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and wedding readings from the Bible and other religious traditions, it captures the magic and deep-seated sense of commitment at the heart of married life.
I Like Being Married shows that the institution of marriage is integral to our common humanity. There are heartwarming stories of courtship including Mikhail Gorbachev s charming "Chasing Raisa" and Rosalyn Carter s story of meeting Jimmy for the first time. Jerry Stiller, Celine Dion, and others who have broken the "rules" describe how they overcame family expectations, age differences, and other obstacles to wed the people they love. In moving and amusing portraits, husbands and wives reveal the qualities and the quirks that make their mates endearing, and vignettes by Ruby Dee, Roy Rogers, and Walter Payton capture the special joys that children bring to a marriage. Long-married couples look back on a lifetime of love and look forward to the future with hope. Lists of the ten best books, songs, movies, and sitcoms about marriage, along with evocative illustrations, round off this unusual, multifaceted look at marital bliss.
Filled with stories, memories, and musings, I Like Being Married is not only an ideal gift for showers, weddings, and anniversaries but is the perfect way to explore the true meaning of marriage.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

Marriage Is

Before you become interested in seeing the light, to you mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after you get an insight into reality, mountains to you are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; but after this when you really attain the place of peace, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters.

--Old Zen saying

Same old slippers,

Same old rice,

Same old glimpse of

Paradise.

--William James Lampton

My husband is my best friend. When I wake up and look at him next to me, I smile. He is a good man and a gift of God to me.

--Carmen Rodriguez
Monticello, New York

Squinching

By Phyllis A. Tickle

One pleasantly cool morning a few weeks ago, I was lying in bed not quite awake and not quite asleep, but just drifting in that state which is halfway between the two. I was thinking of nothing more significant and meaningful than how good the blanket felt up around my shoulders and that the tip of my nose was just cold enough to feel good too. In the half-light seeping around the edges of the bedroom shades, I could tell from the faint smile on his face that Sam was floating in the same delicious suspension as I was. At the time, he was on his back, which meant that I was lying in my favorite position as well. On my left side with my knees drawn up half under his buttocks and my torso shoved solidly up against his, I had my left arm tucked under me and my neck cradled on top of his outstretched right arm. My right hand lay flat on top of his chest, secured by the tight, warm grip of his left one.

It was, as I have said, a perfectly lovely moment. I would even say a perfectly ordinary one, were it not that something in me rebels at the notion of the words lovely and ordinary being in the same sentence together without any explanation. Be that as it may, however, we were lying there in customary positions and totally familiar circumstances when it happened. I was watching Sam's face, trying to gauge just how awake he really was and how much longer we were going to be able to fend off reality by lying there like truant children. He still had his eyes closed--a good and hopeful sign, I thought--and his breathing was still reassuringly even and deep . . . or it was, until abruptly he did this thing. He squinched.

Yes, he squinched. The side of his nose from its beginning at the inside edge of his cheek to the peak of its bridge wrinkled up like corduroy. Not another facial muscle moved, not another piece of skin twitched, just that thin, tightly drawn bit from cheek base to bridge.

"That's not possible," I thought and realized that I was abruptly awake. Then just as I had almost persuaded myself that no one could even do what I thought he had done, Sam Tickle up and did it again . . . which pretty much says it all for me. That is, I had been lying beside that same man in that same position for almost fifty years and he had never once squinched before. I mean, just as I was beginning to think I had it all figured out at last, the man goes and takes up squinching. I was appalled and, for several days thereafter, I continued to be offended . . . not so much at Sam, you understand, as at a system that lets a person change his personal habits after fifty years and not even have to apologize for it. I got up grumpy and stayed that way for a good five minutes before the whole thing struck me as being as funny as it was annoying.

When I was a maturing teenager, my mother used to say, "Marriage is" when considering such moments and she'd stop the sentence right there. For all my pestering, she would never add either predicate nominative or predicate adjective to her statement. She would just shake her head and simply repeat "Marriage is" as if that were the whole sum of the thing. Since the squinching episode, I have begun to accept the authenticity of her statement and, almost, to appreciate its sufficiency.

My mother's other great pronouncement on the subject of marriage was that married people, men and women alike, could all be divided into two groups. There were those, she said, who were constantly conscious of their marriages at some varying level of awareness, and then there were those who were totally unaware of their married state, much less of its being a free-standing part of themselves. By this she meant something entirely different from what you and I would infer were she to say the words in our hearing today. That is, my mother was not speaking of flirtatious conduct or even of some casual naughtiness in the sheets, but of a kind of anesthetized indifference that sometimes characterized marriage in her times. With the exception of spinster aunts and older widows, almost everyone in my mother's day was married simply because, as she said, marriage was, just like eating was or sleeping was or earning a living and believing in something were. Marriage was as matter-of-fact a part of human existence as any other of these things, just as it was closely related to each of them by social expectation and outright necessity.

Times have changed, of course, and blessedly marriage is only one of several attractive and sustaining options open to us. Even fifty years ago when Sam and I took our vows, either or both of us could probably have bucked expectation and remained both single and still respected at one and the same time, had we chosen to do so. Certainly there's no doubt that any one of our children, boys and girls alike, could have opted out of marriage with never a word or a query from their peers, their employers, or their fellow citizens. In point of fact, three of them did take their own sweet time and almost thirty years of life before succumbing, though their grandmother, were she still around, would never, never be able to put them in her category of the unaware. Rather, delaying marriage has bred in them that kind of honed intentionality and focus that seem to me to be becoming hallmarks of marriage in these days of many options.

In point of fact, if I were to assume my mother's penchant for separating married people by types, I would have to confess that I can think right now of no more than two (maybe three) acquaintances who might possibly fit into her indifference column; and both of them are over fifty. Everybody else I can think of falls more or less into her category of the constantly aware. The difference between my effort at groupings and my mother's, then, is that I effectively have only one group . . . that, and the fact that my one big group has four parts. Of course, nobody I know ever stays in any one of my four boxes for more than a few days at a time, but it consoles me to have a sense of order about such things. All of which is to say that, unless my powers of observation fail me, the range of emotion among the married and aware today seems to swing on a rather frequent basis from "I hate being married to XYZ," to "I hate being married," to "I like being married," to those ebullient, euphoric moments of "I love being married to XYZ."

The interesting thing, now that I am old and can observe with more perspective if not objectivity, is that bouncing back and forth amongst these states of self-perception is not only normal, but even helpful. It is only the business of staying in any one of them for too long that seems to invite disease if not in one's self, then in one's mate, and certainly in one's marriage.

I rarely hate being married to Sam Tickle on Sunday, for instance. On Sunday, we get up late, we go to church, we go by his mill working plant to feed R.J., the guard dog with the perpetually happy disposition (Don't ask!), and we go out for a late, long lunch. What's not to like about that? As a schedule, it's predictable, low-key, and almost impeccably...

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Verlag
Doubleday
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385502311
ISBN 13 
9780385502313
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Herausgeber
Leach Michael, Borchard Therese Johnson
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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