Anniversary

 

Dear Mark

Today is our wedding anniversary. 

Forty-seven years ago we stood under a chuppa* 

alongside our parents, 

your brother, the best man, 

my sister, the maid of honor, 

and committed our lives to one another. 

I could close my eyes and imagine myself back on our wedding day, 

so young, 

so naive, 

so sure that our life would never go by as fast as it has. 

Today, only my sister and I remain on this earth. 

Time has stolen many of the people we love. 

We are like a grain of sand in this mysterious universe we are part of. 

But our love is so much more than that. 

Our love expands beyond the universe, 

the moon, 

the sun, 

the stars, 

the galaxies. 

And my grief is the gravity weighing me down, 

like a bag of sand, 

that I carry around while I try to exist on this earth,  

without you. 

*A chuppah (also spelled huppah, chupah, or chuppa) is a canopy used in Jewish wedding ceremonies, symbolizing the couple's new home. It typically consists of four poles supporting a cloth covering, often a tallit (prayer shawl). The chuppah is a central element of the ceremony, representing the couple's home, God's presence, and the community that supports them. 

I am 10 months closer to my seventh decade. I have lived alone for 22 months now. It doesn't get easier. I’ve just gotten used to it, or perhaps not. It seems the longer he’s gone the more I miss him. The more I see couples together, the more incomplete I feel. Sometimes I want to go back and live my life all over again, like watching my favorite movie, A Wonderful Life. I’ve been thinking about going back to my childhood and writing about it. That would be almost like reliving it. 

I was born in the 50s, the second child and daughter to Sylvia and George. Two years after me they had another daughter and four years after that, they finally had a son, which was an historic occasion in my family. I was referred to as “the middle child”, even though, after there were four of us, I didn’t agree with that label because the middle was inconclusive with an even number, in my opinion. Along with my parents and siblings, my maternal grandmother lived with us. I was never alone. There was always someone there to talk to, to yell at, to play with, to hug. 

My grandmother was the matriarch of the Waltzer family and that sort of made my home a “ground zero” for the Waltzer family members who all lived within either walking or driving distance. Grandma had eight children, 18 grandchildren, and 4 great grandchildren, so there was always a barrage of relatives stopping by. 

That’s how life began for me, in a corner house in Brooklyn, NY, and I lived there until the day I got married at age 22. Our block was lined with brick houses, of which, many were surrounded by picket fences. Inside were aproned housewives who cooked stews in their tidy homes, where secrets were tucked inside their neatly folded laundry, because in the 50s and 60s everything had to appear perfect and there were always secrets that could disrupt the appearance of perfection.  

One of my most vivid memories was on a summer day when I was still a child. It was hot; so hot it seemed that the air was motionless. Usually on these days, voices of children hung and echoed in the air while they played with their balls or bikes. But that day there was no sound at all. I sat on my bottom stoop, head in my hands, moping.  A shadow came upon me.  It was Aunt Dorothy’s voice that brought me to reality. 

 

“Are you feeling miserable, Jeannie?” she asked, without even a hint of sympathy. 

I looked up, shrugged my shoulders, and lifted my head to hear the rest of Aunt Dorothy’s words of wisdom, as she loomed over me. She didn’t wait for my response. 

“Don’t you worry, dear.  One day, you’ll grow up to become a beautiful young woman. You’ll meet a man.  He’ll marry you. And you’ll have him to make you miserable the rest of your life!”

And then she stomped up the long stairs to the front door, leaving the echo of her footsteps and the sharp slam of the screen door in the lifeless air as she entered my house. 

I will always remember that day from my childhood. I don’t think I ever thought of marrying anybody before then. I was only about 8 years old.  As far as I was concerned, I was going to stay in that house for the rest of my life, eating roast beef for dinner two to three times a week and baked chicken every Friday night. But, just the notion of what my aunt said planted a seed. And every night I would go to sleep imagining which one of the boys in my class at PS 119 I would marry. I never considered this man could be from anywhere else, certainly not Borough Park and Canarsie, which is where that actual man was from.  My world was very small at the time. 

My world got bigger when I went to Junior High School. There were more boys and I had crushes on a few of them. Some had crushes on me, but never the ones I had crushes on, of course. I began to realize finding a husband was not so easy. Then I went to high school. In high school I forgot about finding my future husband and concentrated on hanging out and going to parties. I dated but was not interested in having a boyfriend. 

I decided to go to college out of town and applied and got accepted into Hartford University. My father sat me down the week before I was supposed to go to the orientation. He was a man of few words, so I listened very carefully to what he was going to say. 

“Why do you want to go out of town to college?” 

I started to respond, but he stopped me, signaling this was a rhetorical question, which led to another rhetorical question. 

“What are you going to do in college?”

This question he responded to. 

“You’re going to meet a guy in college and you’re going to get engaged and marry him.”

I just nodded, thinking, “where is he going with this”?

“You can meet a guy in Brooklyn College just as easily as you can meet one in Hartford University.”

He finally let me respond. “So my future husband, who you’re sure I’m going to college for, is in Brooklyn College? Or you just don’t want me to go out of town to school?”

“You’re going to Brooklyn College, not Hartford,” were his final words and he went back to reading his newspaper, The New York Times. 

I really was not disappointed. The thought of going to college out of town scared me to death. I never liked sleepaway camp, so why would I like going away to college? But why did my father think I was getting married so fast? At that point I was past the whole idea of marriage. It was the 70s, after all. Love was free, bras were optional, and feminism was on the rise. And the last thing I was looking for was a husband. 

My future husband was not in Brooklyn College, by the way. He worked in an appliance store, Ciro’s, on Utica Avenue, with my friend, Michele. He liked to dance and he knew how to do the hustle. We wanted to learn how to hustle and Michele told me that he would teach us. She also said I might like him. I said, “Sure”. A few weeks passed and she told me that he had a girlfriend, so she can’t set me up with him because he’s too busy with her. I was unfazed. However, I had to go to Ciro’s for something and I saw Michele and she pointed him out. He had an afro (it was the seventies), he was short, a little stocky, but looked like a teddy bear. I passed by him as I was exiting the store. He didn’t see me because he was talking and as I slowly walked by him I realized he was talking about his girlfriend. “Ugh! I said to myself, what a schmuck!” The next moment, it came right into my head, like divine intervention, I heard, “You’re going to marry that guy.” This is exactly what happened.  

Mark broke up with his girlfriend soon after that night. I went back to Ciro’s and bought a tape recorder from him. He called me the next day to find out how I liked the tape recorder. I loved his voice. He asked me out and we went to dinner. I knew that divine intervention voice in my head was right when he kissed me. I saw him almost every day. After two weeks he asked me not to see anyone else.  After three weeks he said, “I think I love you.” I asked, “When will you know for sure?” And after six weeks he asked me to marry him. I said, “Yes”. Then he said, “Can we have modern furniture?”

We never had modern furniture, by the way. Although, I did redecorate and changed the furniture to modern after he died. We had two wonderful daughters, who married two wonderful guys, a granddaughter and a grandson, and a lovely life together. Our third grandchild, Julian Mark, was born after Mark died. We lived in four different houses, one in Staten Island, one in Long Island, one in North Carolina and the one I live in now in Florida. 

There were tough times. But there was always love. He was not easy to live with but I suppose neither was I. If I could think of one song that could sum up our life together it would be Our House by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. It reminds me of when we had our house in Long Island. We had a wood burning fireplace, and he loved going to the backyard, carrying in the wood and making a fire. I bought flowers every week and always kept them in a vase on our island in the kitchen. 

Happy Anniversary Mark. 

I wish you were here. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aunVlekXjkE&list=PPSV