Gari Melchers: Marriage (1893)

" … we attemded a banquet."

Every present moment inexorably slips into some past, but not every past qualifies as history or aspires to. I might best describe much of everyday experience as maintenance, not in any way a similar substance to what might inexorably become history. Births, deaths, and marriages seem destined to become history, while the memory of Tuesday's supper doesn't seem likely to make it to the end of that week. Every moment might ultimately reek of significance. What wouldn't we give to have a portrait of a typical Tuesday supper from the Middle Ages? Events must have seemed as disposable and unimportant to our ancestors then as our odd Tuesdays seem to us now. That said, though, we occasionally engage in making FreshHistory, moments that seem likely to become posthumously noteworthy, worth remembering, and entered into the permanent record.

For The Muse and I and close Fambly, one of those events occurred yesterday with the marriage of our dear GrandOtter. The Otter, as we came to refer to her, was a frequent house guest and visitor through much of her childhood, her first visit dating to her seventh summer when she returned with us from a visit to The Muse's native South Dakota. She had the marvelous skinned knee summer every seven-year-old should experience, riding bikes and visiting the swimming pool. That was the summer I called her on her fake reading skills. She was bright enough almost to remember the text from any picture book I'd read to her once. Almost remember, but not quite. Man, was she pissed when I started calling her on her ruse. By the end of that summer, she was beginning actually to read.

She had a rough winter that year, immersed back into a punishing school back in South Dakota, she failed to thrive. By the following summer, she'd lost much of her previous summer's progress. We brought her back to Walla Walla again, and we thrived together. By late summer, I admitted to The Muse that I couldn't face letting her return to South Dakota again. Negotiations followed where Graig, The Muse's son, and The Otter's single father, acknowledged that he was also failing to thrive in South Dakota. He relocated, moving in with The Otter and us until he found work and income. All that followed flowed from there, one of those historical convergences nobody could have predicted, the kind that almost always results in FreshHistory.

The story shifted again almost twenty years after that first OtterSummer, into a fresh OtterSpring where she begins a new volume, much more than merely a fresh chapter. She's carrying our first great-granddaughter. History seems absolutely inexorable now. I can feel myself fading backward into dust from here. I witnessed the undoubtedly blesséd event, understanding that it prefaces the end of my presence here. It was my first definite intimation that I had become a wasting witness, a temporary guardian of an increasingly irrelevant past. Our good work in helping to raise TheOtter will undoubtedly resonate going forward and take on lives of its own, ultimately ignorant of its originators or amplifiers. We contributed to the future we should have always known we would never witness. We contributed out of love or were never there, just another eminently forgettable Tuesday supper when we attended a feast. This must be what blessed feels like.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Fambly, #PureSchmaltz