Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

I love the once-official iconography for scenes of Mary on her deathbed. Her son stands before her in two different bodies. The grown-up son is there, and so is the baby.

After 1950, such icons (called “Dormitions”) stopped being good Catholic devotions and became heretical, because the Assumption of Mary became official Catholic dogma.  (Translation: she flew up to Heaven instead of dying.) But I digress.

My point is that we see the people we love through kaleidoscope eyes. (Good old Beatles.) That barefoot sleepy guy who just made coffee this morning is the young husband who stood up to armed guards in an Italian airport rather than let a door close between you. He’s the distinguished professor giving a learned talk in a suit you had to bug him for days to get him to buy. He is the funny funky grad student you fell in love with while watching Bobby Fischer. And he is the dirty rat who just ate the bagel I was going to eat.

And for our children, that seeing-double thing goes double. Put them into our dreams and the seeing-double goes triple. My two twenty-something daughters inhabit my dreams with at least ten years age lag. Mickey, the grad student, sometimes manages to be 14, but Mira, now almost a senior in college, hasn’t yet made it past 7. Yes, of course I respect them as adults–at least, when my eyes are open. The truth is, I kind of enjoy having the best of both worlds–grown-up daughters making their own decisions in the real world, little kids I can play with in my dreams.

When I get to my deathbed (not yet, thank you very much), I hope that like the traditional Virgin Mary I get to be surrounded by a kaleidoscope of my memories.

Thanks always to Teresa Nielsen Hayden for talking about such interesting stuff.

…on July 3, 1973, I was a kid in my twenties about to get married for the second time, and boy was I nervous. Just about everything went wrong that day.

• Because we “eloped” with just 4 grad student pals as our witnesses, our families assumed a baby was coming. In fact, we were just too impatient with all the postponements due to “Aunt Agatha can’t come June 7, how about the next weekend–no, Uncle Ed can’t make the next weekend…” Well, a baby did come, about 15 months later.
• I baked us a chocolate wedding cake from a mix, but assumed I wouldn’t have to grease and flour my brand-new miracle cake pans lined with Teflon. Wrong! Our guests ate bowls of ice cream with huge hunks of scraped-from-the-pan cake on top.
• We got lost driving to Dutch Neck traffic court, so we missed the time of appointment with the judge. We and our pals had to sit through an hour of testimony about stop-sign violations and DUI before being called into the back room for our “ceremony.”

One thing went right–I married a wonderful man, who hasn’t once stopped surprising me in all the 30 years afterward.

Feel free to throw rice anytime.