Tuesday, May 15, 2012

The Spectre of a Rose

It's a rainy Tuesday here in upper Manhattan as Yours Truly awakes from his dogmatic slumbers to put fingers to keyboard once again. As usual, there's a lot of bile and only a smidgeon of edification waiting to burst into digital obscurity. But first . . .




May 15, 1993, was a Saturday—a warm, sunny, mid-spring Saturday, a perfect day for a wedding. A bald, bearded, and very anxious man in his mid-forties, neither affluent nor prepossessing, dressed for the first time in his life in a morning coat, stood before the altar of a Brooklyn church. Next to him stood a young woman in a white wedding dress that had been her mother's. After exchanging vows and rings—hers had been his mother's—kneeling for blessings and for the Blessed Sacrament, the two of them turned and walked up the aisle hand in hand, into a modest but loving reception and then into a future that turned out to be very different from the one he, at least, had been able to imagine

But for that man, at least, now balder, still bearded and anxious, less prepossessing and even further from affluent, that day and all that followed from it—five children, days and nights of laughter and of tears, of caresses and of coldness, of fleeting dreams and persistent nightmares—has shown him the richness of the house of God.

And for the woman, who has borne the consequences of his fecklessness and bad judgments, saddled with making up for his shortcomings as a husband and a father, how does she remember that nineteen-years-ago day?

The devotees of Madame Blavatsky sought to evoke the spectre of a rose from its ashes. I am no magician; I can only pray that even now, somewhere there is a bud that, with time and nourishment and love, can burst into blossom again.

Happy anniversary, Julia.