Bountiful Couple: There is no secret / Still? / Memoir - 2/11/07

[Smartmarriages]

- 70 YEARS TOGETHER
- STILL VALENTINES? LONGTIME MARRIAGES SHOULD BE COMMENDED
- MEMOIR OF A MARRIAGE
##########################
I've read dozens of articles this weekend about couples being honored for
their long unions, about celebrations of World Marriage Day and ceremonies
blessing marriages, as I'm sure many of you have. Valentine's Day inspires
great writing! But these were my favorites. The first, because it reminds us
of the POWER OF MOTHER NATURE - she does her job while couples often credit
it to just being in the right place at the right time even after ending the
night with a kiss like that ("The real surprise was falling in love in the
first place.")  And then it goes on to make all of us (doing this work) wish
we could recreate the circumstances to which this couple attribute their
life long happiness and success, to quote them:
> ³There's no secret,² said Stan. ". . .  . . . we had a real break in one
> way, because WE DIDN'T KNOW ANY DIFFERENT.  WE GREW UP WITH THE IDEA THAT THIS
> WAS THE WAY IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE."

IF ONLY we could restore that for our kids and grandkids that life-long
devoted marriage is "the way it is supposed to be" - what a gift we would
give - homemade granola to the end.  - diane

###########################

- 70 YEARS TOGETHER
Bountiful couple have no secrets for long, happy marriage
They received the top honor among 28 pairs lauded at an annual Utah
conference
By Jennifer Barrett
The Salt Lake Tribune
Feb 11, 2007  

It must have been fate that brought Iva and Stan Price together at the dance
that night so many years ago.

   She usually spent weekends on the family farm rather than in Idaho Falls
where she worked, and he had gone to the dance with another girl. But chance
kept Iva in town and sent Stan's friend home with someone else. That left
just the two of them to walk home together. Alone.

   ³My parents always told me never to get myself into that kind of
situation,² Iva recalled with a giggle.

   Heaven knows what her parents would have said about what came next. When
they got to the doorstep of Iva's employer, ³Stan grabbed me and kissed me,²
Iva said. ³He's never kissed me like that since.²

   The next morning, Stan was back. That was 70 years ago, and they've been
together ever since. On Saturday night, the Bountiful couple received the
Extraordinary Marriage Award at the state's 15th annual Celebration of
Marriage conference. Twen- ty-seven other couples also were honored,
including Chester and Esther Memmott of Millard County, married 70 years;
and Wallace and Mary Ott of Garfield County, married 72 years.

   "These couples are shining examples of what marriage can and should be,
especially to youths, who often don't grow up with this kind of example
anymore,² said Melanie Reese of the Utah Commission on Marriage.

Nearly 700 people attended the event at the Salt Palace Convention Center in
downtown Salt Lake City, sitting in on seminars about money, sex,
male-female brain wiring, remarriage and more.

   ³It makes us excited about becoming parents and about our marriage," said
Lydia Metcalf, 26, who attended with her husband, Mike, 24. They said the
conference will help them negotiate their own future together. "It's good to
have frequent reminders of techniques that can help. It's got us talking."

   The Prices aren't surprised by their own long union. The real surprise
was falling in love in the first place.

   Although they spent much of their childhood only 10 miles apart, they
came from different worlds. He was a Presbyterian boy from a tight-knit
Swedish-American community. She was a ³country girl² from a large,
fourth-generation LDS family. It was not the union either family would have
dreamed of.

   But Stan knew immediately what he wanted, and Iva couldn't seem to shake
him. ³At the end of three months, I said OK to going steady because I just
couldn't do anything else,² she said.

   That kind of steadfastness has remained with them through three states,
several jobs, six children, 15 grandchildren, 26 great-grandkids, and one
great-great. It's also been with them through countless golf games, square
dances, miles run (and walked, which they do every day), and skiing, which
they did into their 70s.

   What's their secret?

   ³There's no secret,² said Stan. ³It's all about trust and faith and
attitude. . . . And we had a real break in one way, because we didn't know
any different. We grew up with the idea that this was the way it was
supposed to be.²

   Ask the Prices about how they weathered the problems that all married
couples supposedly go through, and they seem a little puzzled. What about
the inevitable ups and downs?

   ³If there were bad times, we forgot 'em,² Stan said.

   Iva agreed, at least up until the past couple of years. She's had
surgery, a fall in the yard and several weeks in a rehabilitation center.

   During her stay, Stan brought her a homemade breakfast of granola, apples
and raisins every morning so she could eat something she liked, something
she was used to.

   That's the kind of attention and caring that has made their marriage a
joy.

   ³He's very tender, very understanding,² Iva said. ³I've always felt like
I could tell him anything.²

   And how about Stan?

   ³It's always been nice coming home,² he said.

############################

- STILL VALENTINES? LONGTIME MARRIAGES SHOULD BE COMMENDED

In this one, I have to admit it's nice to see Julie Baumgardner of
First Things First and our "Marriage Week" being quoted/mentioned in
Australia. But it's also wonderful that it points out that such a small
intervention ("read 1 Corinthians 13 together each day for a month") can
turn a marriage around. That just a little support for marriage can go such
a long way - that is the cultural change we're so determined to put in
place.   - diane 

Still valentines? Longtime marriages should be commended
Sydney Herald, Australia
Feb 11, 2007 

"Doesn't anybody stay together anymore?" asked a once popular song. Sadly,
it's a question that's still in tune with today's marriage miseries.

Home breakups are the major tragedy of our time and the trend keeps
accelerating. Thankfully, there are some efforts to right the marital ship
and stem the tide of this plague that so negatively affects children and
those left alone to raise them.

The seven days leading up to Valentine's Day have been designated as
Marriage Week in the United Kingdom since 1996 and in the United States
since 2002.

Julie Baumgardner, director of "First Things First," believes Valentine's
Day is the perfect time to make this emphasis, saying: "We celebrate
birthdays, we celebrate holidays, but when it comes to marriage, people
often forget that it's really something to be celebrated."

An organization called "Anscombe," at Princeton University, is sponsoring an
upcoming conference titled "Making Marriage Last." I've written to this
Princeton group, commending them for their effort to strengthen marriages.

My first five words today were spoken to my valentine of more than 50 years:
"I'm thankful we're here together." And my sleepy valentine's reply made my
day: "I'd be thankful to be anywhere with you!"

Love makes marriage one of life's greatest adventures, but married people
who ignore the importance of cultivating love through caring words and
attitudes miss out on the mutual feeling of success that accompanies making
a marriage last.

A seminary student and his wife were having such serious marital problems
that they concluded divorce was their only option. Then, agreeing to give
their marriage one more chance, they sought counsel from one of the
professors at the seminary. The wise professor advised them to read 1
Corinthians 13 together each day for a month and then report to him on how
they were doing.

This moving description of love, so often read at weddings, says love is to
be patient, kind, giving, forgiving and faithful. At the end of that
month-long experiment, this troubled couple had discovered the meaning of
love and rescued their marriage, enabling them to have a long and satisfying
relationship and share their discovery with others.

During my years as a pastor, I developed a counseling approach for couples
who came to talk to me about getting married that I hoped would help them
keep their love alive.

First, I asked the prospective groom why he wanted to marry this woman. His
answer was almost always the expected: because he loved her. "Why do you
love her?" I then asked.

An awkward period of silence often followed during which I felt sorry for
the bride-to-be whose future husband couldn't think of one reason for loving
her.

Finally, after time to think about it, each of these men was able to give
reasons for their love, as did the prospective brides when they faced the
same question. If you haven't voiced your love to your valentine recently,
speak up!

Remove all doubts about your love today!

#############################
- MEMOIR OF A MARRIAGE
And, this one.  Again, it teases out the amazing power of Mother Nature in
the "fall in love" stage and captures the long slow art of building a
beautiful marriage. - diane

Of their meeting: 

> But he didn't get her undivided attention until the second party, as he
> recounts in the book:
> 
> "I was like a lounge comic who had been informed that a booker for 'The
> Tonight Show' was in the audience.
> 
> "Recalling that party in later years, Alice would sometimes say, 'You have
> never again been as funny as you were that night.'
> 
> " 'You mean I peaked in December of 1963?' I'd say, 20 or even 30 years later.
> 
> " 'I'm afraid so.'
> 
> "But I never stopped trying to match that evening."

Of the art: 

> Forget about heart-shaped bathtubs. . .
> "Anyone who wants to know what it might be like to love the same person for
> most of a lifetime has only to pick up this little book to find out. . .
> In response to the book, Trillin says, "I got a lot of letters like the one
> from a young woman in New York who wrote that she sometimes looked at her
> boyfriend and thought, 'But will he love me like Calvin loved Alice?' " Some
> said the book described exactly what they hoped for in a marriage.


Memoir of a marriage
Calvin Trillin's new book, 'About Alice,' pays tribute to his late wife:
'Educator, Author, Muse'
San Francisco Chronicle
Heidi Benson, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, February 11, 2007

Calvin Trillin has an admission. He and his wife, Alice, did not celebrate
Valentine's Day.

"It was not something done by people of our vintage," says Trillin, 71,
cradling a gin martini in a window seat at the Slanted Door restaurant in
the Ferry Building one recent rainy afternoon.

Outside, fog drapes the Bay Bridge, and the flat, gray light makes colors
pop. A bicycle chained to a railing is startlingly green. The author's eyes
are melancholy blue.

He often haunts the Ferry Building, he says, since one daughter and two of
his and Alice's four grandchildren live in San Francisco.

Forget about heart-shaped bathtubs. If there are secrets to lasting love,
they can be found, in luminous fragments, in Trillin's new book, "About
Alice" (Random House), a tribute to his wife of nearly 40 years. Alice
Stewart Trillin died in 2001 at 63.

"Anyone who wants to know what it might be like to love the same person for
most of a lifetime has only to pick up this little book to find out," said
the reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor.

Published this month and already a best-seller nationally and in the Bay
Area, "About Alice" began as an essay in the New Yorker magazine, where
Trillin has been a staff writer since 1963.

"David Remnick asked, in a sort of hushed way, if I'd ever be interested in
writing about Alice," explains Trillin (who calls the Remnick regime at the
New Yorker the Restoration, in a wry reference to the Tina Brown era that
preceded it).

The article stirred readers in ways he never expected.

"I thought if anybody wrote me or the New Yorker, it would be people whose
spouses had died or people who had loved ones who had cancer," Trillin said.
Alice had survived lung cancer at age 35, published essays about her
experience and wrote countless letters brimming with practical and spiritual
advice to friends, acquaintances and friends-of-friends whose lives had been
touched by the disease.

In response to the book, Trillin says, "I got a lot of letters like the one
from a young woman in New York who wrote that she sometimes looked at her
boyfriend and thought, 'But will he love me like Calvin loved Alice?' " Some
said the book described exactly what they hoped for in a marriage.

He's still bemused.

"I didn't know I was writing about marriage. I thought I was writing about
Alice."

At the Slanted Door, a woman sips a goblet of herbal "art tea," a house
specialty. It appears that a sea anemone is living in the bottom of her
glass. Trillin takes notice: "I hear they're having a problem with the
water." Webster's could, and should, illustrate the word "deadpan" with his
portrait.

The Trillins raised two daughters in a Greenwich Village brownstone they
gutted and renovated in the '60s.

"I was a pretty involved father for the times," he says. "I started working
at home from the time the girls were young. My daughters just assumed that
their husbands would be equal partners, but it was considered kind of weird
back when I did it."

Weird but not surprising, under the circumstances. "If you're writing
something, you'd really rather change diapers," he explains.

A pioneer, perhaps, but "compared to my sons-in-law, I was a malingerer.
Rules have changed for the better. My father never changed a diaper, and he
didn't go in the kitchen." His sons-in-law are as far ahead of him as he was
ahead of his father, he says. "They're way beyond me."

Anyone who has read Trillin knows that he grew up in Kansas City, Mo., where
his father, a grocer, was prone to delivering such lines as "I haven't had
so much fun since the hogs ate little sister" in his flat Midwestern accent.
He also spoke Yiddish.

"I grew up in a house where my parents had a happy marriage," Trillin says.
"They never had an argument." According to common wisdom, such contentment
-- though a positive role model for future relationships -- could have been
a serious handicap to a writer.

"I did have a happy childhood," he allows. "I'll tell you that in San
Francisco. In New York, that would be like saying you stopped on the way to
the dinner party to sell heroin to schoolchildren."

Trillin denies having anything to do with how well their daughters turned
out. "Abigail is a legal-services attorney for children, Sarah is a clinical
social worker. I want to assure you that I tried to instill in them the
value of selfishness and even rapaciousness," he writes. "But they had Alice
there as a model."

In 1976, Alice was diagnosed with lung cancer, though she had never smoked.
After surviving surgery and chemotherapy, she went into action. She wrote an
article about coping with serious illness, "Of Dragons and Garden Peas," for
the New England Journal of Medicine. She wrote about the folly of
glamorizing female smokers in film and fashion magazines. She joined those
lobbying for a smoking ban in New York City. She shared her knowledge about
doctors and treatments; one of her letters -- "Dear Bruno," written to a
friend's 12-year-old son who had cancer -- was published as a book.

"Alice's response to having cancer was a reminder that an intellectual is
not just someone who might be able to translate 'heuristic' ..." Trillin
writes. "It's someone whose instinct is to analyze anything that happens and
try to make some sense out of it."

But in the spring of 2001, a routine exam showed that the treatment for
Alice's cancer 30 years before had weakened her heart. She needed a bypass
immediately. "As they wheeled her away, she was smiling. She said they were
going to fix her heart," he writes. Alice died four months later of cardiac
arrest.

Trillin is "the last of the deadline poets" (he has published two volumes of
the political verse he writes weekly for the Nation) and a storyteller who
counts the ways he loves Alice -- "an incorrigible, even ridiculous
optimist" -- through anecdote.

There was the time, here in San Francisco, when he was giving a talk at
Herbst Theatre as part of City Arts & Lectures. Someone asked how Alice
liked the way she was portrayed in his work. (He has said that "About Alice"
is an attempt to clarify the "sitcom" version of their life, in which she
played the straight man, George Burns, to his screwball Gracie Allen.)

Trillin leveled with the audience. He said Alice thought his portrayal made
her sound like "a dietitian in sensible shoes."

Then the questioner asked if Alice was in the audience. "When I said she
was, he asked if she'd mind standing up. Alice stood," he writes. "As usual,
she looked smashing. She didn't say anything. She just leaned over and took
off one of her shoes -- shoes that looked like they cost about the amount of
money required in some places to tide a family of four over for a year or
two -- and, smiling, waved it in the air."

Retelling the story over lunch, he leans forward to share what is not a
secret: "I won't claim I was completely unmindful of her appearance." By all
accounts, including photographic evidence, Alice was a knockout.

After her death, Trillin got a letter from a good friend. "Alice was nice
and she was concerned and she was smart and when she talked to you, she was
thinking about you, and, also, she was so very pretty," it read. "I always
thought of you as a wonderful guy, but still I couldn't figure out how you
managed to get Alice."

Then and now, Trillin calls it "just dumb luck."

When they first met -- at a 1963 Greenwich Village party thrown by Victor
Navasky, longtime editor of the Nation, for his short-lived magazine Monocle
-- Trillin claims Alice "glowed." She was in her 20s and already teaching at
Hofstra University. "She didn't defer to me or anybody else," says Trillin.
"If she disagreed with you, you heard it pretty quick."

But he didn't get her undivided attention until the second party, as he
recounts in the book:

"I was like a lounge comic who had been informed that a booker for 'The
Tonight Show' was in the audience.

"Recalling that party in later years, Alice would sometimes say, 'You have
never again been as funny as you were that night.'

" 'You mean I peaked in December of 1963?' I'd say, 20 or even 30 years
later.

" 'I'm afraid so.'

"But I never stopped trying to match that evening."

When Alice's obituary ran in the New York Times, the headline read:
"Educator, Author, Muse." They got the order right, Trillin says.

When she died, he was writing a novel about parking in New York -- "a
subject so silly that I think I would have hesitated to submit the book to a
publisher if she hadn't, somewhat to her surprise, liked it," he writes. The
dedication reads: "I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for
Alice."

Today, Trillin's schedule is tight. Before heading out into the rain for
another appointment, he takes one last bite of shaking beef. Told that it is
Mick Jagger's favorite dish on the menu, he asks, "Will it make us
androgynous?"

There are still so many Alice stories to tell. When their first daughter was
born, for example. Back then, he remembers, there were actually arguments
about whether men should be present when their wives gave birth. (Nowadays,
the birthing room is as crowded as a cocktail party, a gynecologist friend
told him.)

But on the day Abigail arrived, Trillin was there. He noticed they were
playing music.

"Now, Alice would say I never asked her to dance. In fact, there may even
have been a complaint about my dancing," he adds, darkly. "So, in the labor
room, I asked her to dance to the Muzak." She declined, understandably, but
imagine her delight.



**************************
Send submissions and comments for the listserv to: diane at smartmarriages.com
Do NOT hit "reply". If you hit reply your email will go into cyberspace and
NO ONE will see your email.

This is a moderated list. Submissions and comments are read by Diane Sollee,
editor. Please indicate if your comment is NOT to be shared with the list.
PLEASE include your email address or url as part of your signature.

Please also understand that with thousands on the list, not all comments can
be shared. Also realize that opinions expressed are not necessarily shared
by members of the Coalition.

To SUBSCRIBE, UNSUBSCRIBE, or Change your subscription address,
use the form at: http://www.smartmarriages.com. Click Newslist - in the
column under the puzzle piece.

To read past posts to the newsletter, visit the Archive at:
http://archives.his.com/smartmarriages/

11th Annual Smart Marriages Conference, Denver Adam's Mark Hotel,
June 28-July 1, 2007
Pre-Conference Training Institutes June 26-28
Post-Conference Training Institutes July 2-3
Details: http://www.smartmarriages.com/conferencedetails.html
Subscribe to the FREE Smart Marriages e-newslist at
http://www.smartmarriages.com

List your program and resources on the Directory of Classes at
http://www.smartmarriages.com
Order conference audio & video CD/DVD/MP3s: 800-241-7785 or
http://www.iPlaybackSmartMarriages.com

Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education, LLC (CMFCE)
Diane Sollee, Director
5310 Belt Rd NW, Washington, DC 20015-1961
http://www.smartmarriages.com
202-362-3332
cmfce at smartmarriages.com

FAIR USE NOTICE: This e-newsletter/site contains copyrighted material the
use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright
owner. We make such material available in our efforts to advance
understanding of marriage, family, couples, divorce, legislation, family
breakdown, etc. We understand this constitutes a 'fair use' of such material
as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with
Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed
without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes. For more
information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you
wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own
that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright
owner.