My parents were married 69 years ago today

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In my grandmother's dreams, Mom was supposed to play Chopin to a hushed audience in Carnegie Hall, marry an ambassador and cook flawless Cornish hens for him and their international guests. Mom was piano tutored, Horace Mann schooled, Smith Colleged, Columbia Universitied, and engaged to that would-be ambassador who made it to Life magazine's cover in the 1950s. Though there was a lot of brilliant material to work with in this girl nicknamed Bobby, her mother always said that raising her alone as a single mother (Grandma Olive was an artist-designer, divorced from Grandpa Sidney when Mom was six) was like raising an army. Mom climbed, crawled, rolled, cartwheeled and otherwise got through the rooms of their house in every way except walking, while Grandma Olive finessed the alignment of delicate tracing paper for wallpaper designs taped to walls. In school Mom swam, dived, and played tennis, basketball and field hockey ambidextrously. No wonder she was voted Best Athlete at every school she attended. Her disciplined fingers played Rachmaninoff's Flight of the Bumble Bee like it was the soundtrack of her encyclopedic mind, and all this put her on course to be the wow! Grandma Olive envisioned when this Bachrach portrait was taken. Bobby in this picture is posing as Barbara in a dress her mother would have spent an entire day scouring NYC for, with Bobby in tow, tormented.

With all that inborn exuberance and strength, and the preparation Grandma helped with, basically, she wasn't supposed to marry my father. He was a Virginian gentleman with red hair like Thomas Jefferson's, but without the worldly substance that might have reassured Grandma Olive. And he wasn't just not wealthy. He was poor. And why was he poor? He had chosen a profession as a Baptist minister, which just made him even less appealing to my grandmother, who explored lots of religions in her lifetime, but not the unsophisticated, unrefined, tacky Baptist church.

Before meeting Dad, in addition to her physical, musical and mental energy, Mom was also brimming with spiritual vigor, debating over a vibrating saxophone in a jazz bar the merits of various religions with Columbia classmates. That spirituality exploded after she heard the Gospel and was offered the chance to become a born again Christian when she took her music students to church in Fairfax, Virginia, where they went to different churches each Sunday. Maybe singing The Old Rugged Cross and having no stand-up-sit-down high liturgy in the Baptist Church was just what her spiritual self wanted, in contrast to those fancy schools and a mother whose standards were impossibly high.

So what is a born again protestant Christian who is Bobby the smart pianist tomboy to do with all that inborn abundance? Either become a missionary or marry a minister. When she eventually met a tall, young, handsome redhead (she loved red hair) who had just become a pastoral intern at the big Southern Baptist church where she had started playing piano, and they shook hands, she knew she would marry him, which she did, March 22, 1941. Then she birthed and raised eight kids (I'm #8), directed the church music program, wrote music (her hymn A Christian Home written to Sibelius' Finlandia tune is sung in most evangelical churches in the U.S. on Mother's Day), led Bible studies, mentored women, taught Sunday School, and played hymns and choruses on the piano that became rhapsodies flooding out the open country church windows into the farm fields along with birdsong from the trees. I think the soybeans grew tendrils like treble clefts those years.

My mom did feed international guests - graduate students at MSU from India, Thailand and China, and half a dozen Thai high schoolers who lived with us in our big wide-open house, including my beautiful sister DeeDee. Mom and Dad were married 54 years until my dad died of lung cancer, though he never smoked. Mom died of Alzheimer's two years later - what a mind she lost! She had channeled every molecule of physical, mental, musical and spiritual energy to God, to my dad, to her family, to the congregation, and to the world through her precious hospitality (she loved to make curried rice for our Indian friends) and her daily prayers for every world leader - around 200 of them - that began at 4am, on her knees, in the dark. I think she didn't need to marry an ambassador. She was one.

I'm sorry I didn't manage to get a photo of Mom and Dad together before this post. You might have noticed that this wedding anniversary musing had little to say about my dad. Maybe one of these memorials will focus on him, but frankly, I do not carry as much of him inside me as I do Mom.

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