Parental Mischief

These are my parents intently watching the Breeders Cup online, rooting for Zenyatta in her last career race.

This is Mom believing she has just seen Zenyatta come from behind for a miraculous win, making her undefeated and one of the greatest racehorses in history!!!!!!

This is Mom finding out that Dad tricked her, making her believe she was watching the 2010 Breeders Cup when in fact she was watching the 2009 Breeders Cup; Dad reveling in his clever joke.

This is Mom, sheepishly gullible, awaiting the actual outcome of the 2010 Breeders Cup with suspense.

The End.

33 Years

33 years ago, the couple in the above photo got married.

Call me biased – they are my parents – but I think they are the cutest couple in the world. Seriously.

Growing up, I saw my parents as…well, a mom and dad whose history began with the birth of their first child – me. But their history as a couple started 7 years before me. What did they do during that golden time before my fragrant diapers punctuated every hour of the day? How did they fall in love?

First, of course, they met. At a church pizza party function. And, as in all good romantic comedies, it was a revelatory moment in which their eyes locked; the world stopped as the heat from their high-voltage attraction melted cheese globs off their pizza slices…

Woops. I forgot I’m not writing a romantic comedy.

When they first met, she didn’t really think anything because he was four years older, and she was with someone else. Their first date may have been when he took her to play racquetball (she had never played before!). Or it may have been when he and his friend passed her on the street and invited her along to donate blood, so she went (“and never again!”). Or it may have been their first fancy dinner in a renovated train car (“it was nice”).

Wait – it was “nice”? I’ve been conditioned to expect the swath of cotton candy fluff that Hollywood offers:

They had only known each other for 3 days when he proposed to her in the middle of a twinkle-lighted forest with a string quartet serenading from the branches…

No. They dated for a while, then he simply asked her, and she said yes.

If my parents’ story was a fireworks-sprinkled Hollywood creation, it would probably have ended long ago. But it’s not, and it didn’t.

As kids my brothers and I used to cry on the rare occasions we heard them fight. We’d ask them if they still loved each other, if they were going to stay together. We weren’t too little to imagine the pain of divorce that many of our friends were experiencing. In response, my dad would assure us as strongly as he could that he and mom would never, never, never, never, never stop loving each other, no matter what.

I don’t know the moment when my mom knew she loved my dad, or what attracted my dad to my mom, or what their favorite thing to do together was, or what my dad was thinking when he went to pick out the ring; but one thing I definitely know – they meant it when they said they loved each other and when they said they loved us. That commitment is the pith of true love, the spine of the story.

Thanks, Mom and Dad, for being the best parents I could have asked for. I wish you many more happy years of real romance: eating lunch together at the mall, taking evening walks, watching your shows, and arguing over things like the right way to cook eggs.

I love you!