Joseph L. Kagle, Jr. Essays

“Love is one ingredient that cannot be overlooked when taking any kind of journey. If it is right and lasting, it is fulfilling and permanent; if it is superficial and momentary, it is still good but shorter lived. Love is also the companion of peace. If you have peace, you probably have love, and visa versa. Next year it will be 50 years of marriage to almost the same person. What is neat is that it seems like we are still on our honeymoon. When this was written, ten years ago, it was good but shorter than now.”

Marriage a melody only two can really hear

     One day you wake up and marriage has lasted 40 years. That is almost two thirds of my age. It seems as if it were yesterday when I walked down the aisle and said, "I do."

     It did not even take a few years to answer, "Do I?" I knew I did and that was that.

     My parents had been married forever. In fact my mother gave Eve a bouquet of flowers as she and Adam ran out of the Garden. My mom said, "It started a tradition."

     My dad told stories, too, and I am sure he never embellished reality. I remember sitting and hear­ing, "Once upon a marriage. . ." "Do you take . . .?" "Till death do you part." "For better. . ." "And they lived happily ever after."

     Forty years ago, we loaded everything valuable in a newly acquired old car and headed toward Col­orado with a few bits of clothing, some hopes and dreams, a newly acquired nursing degree and some presents from the marriage ritual.

     The car was really used but we did not notice. It was our first car. It lasted through graduate school even after the first gear and reverse gave out. It be­came normal to choose a parking place where you could pull forward after a gentle push. Everyone else was without money, so keeping a "clunker" al­ive and still kicking was part of the honeymoon.

     It took a trailer when we journeyed to the first job in Wisconsin. We both felt upscale and affluent. We both had jobs, even if one honored the sun god and the other the moon goddess. We would meet on dates between these twin gods.

Learning about snow again

      Twenty years later, it took two large steel cargo containers to come back from the sunny shores of Guam. We remember our infant children running outside without adequate clothing, jumping into a snow drift in upstate New York and disappearing from sight. Snow was something that all of us had to learn all over again.

     It was only two large vans to Texas in 1987. In our mind's eye, it seems only yesterday when our teen­age daughter stated, "You have destroyed my life forever," because we had moved in her senior year in high school. I was speechless but my wife was quick to observe, "No, we have just changed it. It is up to you to destroy it." Of course, happy ending, happy ending, our daughter did not destroy her life. She added an enjoyable Texas to it.

  Today, we are working hard at getting rid of physical possessions. It is time again, with our chil­dren moving out to their own adventures. Now, we can get in one car with hopes and dreams, an ac­quired degree of understanding about our joint lives and a few presents: a sense of work and commit­ment, a rich appreciation of humor, a degree of skepticism without losing the magic of living, love for each other and those close to us, and a continuing appetite for adventure.

Commitment to work

    Forty years of love is a commitment of work. It is taking the stuff of life and making it better each day. Marriage is an art. It is a dance between the canvas of others and the brushstrokes of selves, a melody that only two can really hear; a landscape that is painted as it is envisioned and a poetic jour­ney filled with shared work, shared memories.

     Anniversary day is not the celebration of what has gone before but what is shared. It is an achieve­ment created by two. It is always a beginning. Anyone should review the past before leaping into the future. With a partner in the leap, it is easier.

     Anniversary day is to live the inside of marriage on the outside. You let a few others into the secret which is not a real secret to those who have been married for a long time.

"Happy Anniversary Day," our friends will say. What else could it be after 40 years of working at it and loving the journey?

“Ever so often I just need to talk to my friend, Bubba Jay, since it give me peace of mind and, at the same time, stretches my mind in directions that I did not consider going toward. So it was this glorious day when I arrived at Bubba Jays house on Dripping Springs Road. He was not at his usual place, sitting beside the Brazos River and gazing into its waters. He was inside the house, doing housework. Hmmmm….”

Romance is on the off days

Valentine's flowers and candy are merely scheduled showmanship

     Bubba Jay the Third was cleaning the house. He vacuumed all the corners and dusted all the shelves. Just-cleaned dishes shined in their rack. I said: "Well, just look at the perfect homemaker."

He shrugged and replied: "I do my part all year long. But recently I noticed on ‘The Dating Game’ that some men do this just on Valentine's Day. That's not romance but showmanship."

"Don't you send flowers and candy on that special heart-shaped day?" I asked.

"No," he smiled. "I give post-valentine presents all the time. I'm always out of season, but it works."

He and Hummingbird Rose have had a romantic love affair forever, it seems.

"What is the most romantic thing that you can think of doing for your sweetheart in this post-valentine period?" I asked innocently.

Bubba beamed, "Warming her side of the bed with my own body on cold winter nights without being asked to do so. Too many men think that romance is just sex. Not the same thing, my friend.

A love affair with living

"Romance is a love-affair-with-living for two," he said. "Candy and flowers are empty symbols when they are given on the expected day. It's not a scheduled event. Planned, yes; scheduled, no. Ro­mance happens on the off days."

I thought for a moment and envisioned what he was suggesting. A couple that rereads old love let­ters or writes new ones and trades them. A couple that goes out upon the Suspension Bridge and listens for the mythic love song of the Orthlock to its mate  just at dusk on the Brazos.

"Any magical moment where you give through love for another is the basis of romance," said Bub­ba Jay. "In fact, take a boat ride up the Brazos Riv­er anytime and you are thrust into another world. Take a journey for two across the smooth waters of Lake Waco at sunset.

"Meet your loved one after work for a planned date where both of you pretend it is the first time. Romance is bringing the wonder factor back into a relationship. Commercial candy and flowers are not even window dressing for the real romance of home, hearth and bed."

 A tray of food in the morning for that special someone brings new meaning to the term "bed and breakfast." There is a surprise factor in romance. Francis Bret Harte described it this way:

Bells of the Past, whose long-forgotten music

Still fills the wide expanse,

Tingling the sober twilight of the Present

With color of romance.

 "Romance is always those faraway places with strange-sounding names," said Bubba.

"Maybe that's why my wife loves to have me pre­tend that I'm French," I said. "The less that she un­derstands the words, the more romantic it is."

 James Mathew Barrie wrote: "She was the thing we call romance, which lives in the little hut behind the blue haze of the pinewoods."

Running out of gas

  Bubba had not noticed Hummingbird Rose enter the room and stand listening to the two of us talking. We both jumped a little when she interrupted our "my-romance-story-is-bigger-than-yours" session.

She asked: "Do you know the story of the two young people who are driving when the young man's car mysteriously runs out of gas so that they can have a love session?

"They call that romance. Actually, romance hap­pens later in life when the two have been married for years and they get amorous on the living room couch. In the heat of the moment, he runs out of gas and she still loves him. Men think that their first love is romance. Women know that only the last love is romance."

   Bubba and I raised our glasses of warm milk. Each took a deep sip, saluted her wisdom and shut up.