It is quite easy to “take time to smell the roses” while you convalesce, in fact, it is perhaps the easiest thing to do. Each sweet bouquet that arrived on my doorstep brought more and more easy joy, gracing our home for more days than you might imagine, with stems of pink and yellow and red, all the colors not seen out our windows during this monochromatic season. Of course, with each flower came healing, their power born of beauty and grace, love and hope.
Sure health and wealth and party vibes are mostly what I love to remember when I think of my past three decades being married to this one. The pastel sunsets and dance floors, the brimming table with family laughing through the holidays and the nights of crazy merrymaking until we dropped, mostly documented with silly selfies and glam shots but nonetheless all seared into memory. Thanks to social media we can look like the rest of the shiny populous celebrating every coffee or salad in joyful glee. But the real test of this marriage, and I will say yours too, is how you creep through the hard stuff. Together we have buried all four of our parents. Mourned friends who passed too young. Lost our home. Lost jobs. Held our children as they shattered over breakups or disappointments. We have stood united. And fallen apart. Indeed we have for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, forged a solid bond.
If you know me at all, you know that my father was not only a doctor of medicine, but a surgeon. I am the first to give this information out. Pride for sure directs this pronouncement, but also because the title was who he was to the world around me. His hands had that careful attention, that steady strength, a surety that I and his patients could rely on. His journey to achieve his professional status was a place of pride too. I grew up hearing stories of how his family all worked together to fund his college education, his long hours of study that earned him scholarships to medical school, his dedication to master his craft: all of it rolled into that one title added to his name, Doctor Donovan. There were odd days here or there when I’d accompany him on hospital rounds or visit him in his office at New York’s Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, but regardless of everything I thought I knew about what his professional responsibilities were, last Friday afternoon it struck me, I knew nothing.
Nine Cent Girl 