Photo by Block Brothers Studio, courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
Fifty years after standing under the huppah, 50 years after the signing and reading of the ketubah, this couple’s family gathered around them to celebrate: sons and sisters and brothers and babies, nephews and cousins and in-laws. Nowadays, most golden wedding anniversary announcements come paired with a studio portrait of the couple, snowy heads tipped together in the center of the frame, two against the world. A group portrait like this speaks in a completely different language; it says that some days you feel like a planet wobbling solo or a planet caught in just one other planet’s field of gravity. Yes, the connector joint, the most crucial point of connection, is the two together, but don’t stop there.
At first, all those thousands of moments will look alike: The straightening of a tie. A hand on a shoulder. The opening and closing of doors. The striking of matches to light candles. The wrapping of gifts. The chop-chop-chopping of vegetables. The flinch as you clean a skinned knee. Ten years go, and 20 years go, and 30. It’s only then you know you’re not tired of hearing that joke, that old story. It’s when you look at a recipe card warped by kitchen steam, corrections made in different scripts, different colors of ink, that you know who you are, know your heart through all these other hearts. You know that we are who is around us. That we are a node on a rhizome, ancestors above, descendants below. We are not a story but instead a word in a story. We are only a sentence and only make sense when we stand next to those who came before us and those who came after.
