A Good Marriage

Recently I read "Have a little faith" by Mitch Albom. It's a real story about two very different people, one Reb (some holy man) and a criminal who develops faith for God later. This particular chapter caught my attention because how simply it explains faith for God and love, the way lives of these two very different people is told focusing the similarity in them. The Reb who is dying is talking to the writer about random things. I have tried to cut short the story. Hope you find it worth reading.

A Good Marriage

According to Jewish tradition, forty days before a male baby is born, a heavenly voice shouts out whom he will marry. If so, the name “Sarah” was yelled for Albert sometime in 1917. Their union was long, loving, and resilient.

They met through a job interview in Brighton Beach—he was a principal, she was seeking an English teacher’s job—and they disagreed on several issues and she left thinking,“There goes that job” ; but he hired her and admired her. And eventually, months later, he asked her into his office.

“Are you seeing anyone romantically?” he inquired.

“No, I’m not,” she replied.

“Good. Please keep it that way. Because I intend to ask you to marry me.”

She hid her amusement.

“Anything else?” she said.

“No,” he answered.

“Okay.” And she left.

It took months for him to follow up, his shyness having taken over, but he did, eventually, and they courted. He took her to a restaurant. He took her to Coney Island. The first time he tried to kiss her, he got hiccups.

Two years later, they were married.

In more than six decades together, Albert and Sarah Lewis raised four children, buried one, danced at their kids’ weddings, attended their parents’ funerals, welcomed seven grandchildren, lived in just three houses, and never stopped supporting, debating, loving, and cherishing each other. They might argue, even give each other the silent treatment, but their children would see them at night, through the door, sitting on the edge of the bed, holding hands.

They truly were a team. From the pulpit, the Reb might zing her with, “Excuse me, young lady, could you tell us your name?” She would get him back by telling people, “I’ve had thirty wonderful years with my husband, and I’ll never forget the day we were married, November 3, 1944.”

“Wait…,” someone would say, doing the math, “that’s way more than thirty years ago.”

“Right,” she would say. “On Monday you get twenty great minutes, on Tuesday you get a great hour. You put it all together, you get thirty great years.”

Everyone would laugh, and her husband would beam. In a list of suggestions for young clerics, the Reb had once written “find a good partner.”

He had found his.

And just as harvests make you wise to farming, so did years of matrimony enlighten the Reb as to how a marriage works—and doesn’t. He had officiated at nearly a thousand weddings, from the most basic to the embarrassingly garish. Many couples lasted. Many did not.

Can you predict which marriages will survive? I asked.

“Sometimes,” he said. “If they’re communicating well, they have a good chance. If they have a similar belief system, similar values, they have a good chance.”

What about love?

“Love they should always have. But love changes.”

What do you mean?

“Love—the infatuation kind—‘he’s so handsome, she’s so beautiful’—that can shrivel. As soon as something goes wrong, that kind of love can fly out the window.

“On the other hand, a true love can enrich itself. It gets tested and grows stronger. Like in Fiddler on the Roof. You remember? When Tevye sings ‘Do You Love Me?’?”

I should have seen this coming. I think Fiddler on the Roof was pretty much the Reb’s worldview. Religion. Tradition. Community. And a husband and wife—Tevye and Golde—whose love is proven through action, not words.

“When she says, ‘How can you ask if I love you? Look at all I’ve done with you. What else would you call it?’

“That kind of love—the kind you realize you already have by the life you’ve created together—that’s the kind that lasts.”

The Reb was lucky to have such a love with Sarah. It had endured hardships by relying on

cooperation—and selflessness. The Reb was fond of telling young couples, “Remember, the only difference between ‘marital’ and ‘martial’ is where you put the ‘i.’”

He also, on occasion, told the joke about a man who complains to his doctor that his wife, when angry, gets historical.

“You mean hysterical,” the doctor says.

“No, historical,” the man says. “She lists the history of every wrong thing I’ve ever done!”

Still, the Reb knew that marriage was an endangered institution. He’d officiated for couples, seen them split, then officiated when they married someone else.

“I think people expect too much from marriage today,” he said. “They expect perfection. Every moment should be bliss. That’s TV or movies. But that is not the human experience.

“Like Sarah says, twenty good minutes here, forty good minutes there, it adds up to something beautiful. The trick is when things aren’t so great, you don’t junk the whole thing. It’s okay to have an argument. It’s okay that the other one nudges you a little, bothers you a little. It’s part of being close to someone. But the joy you get from that same closeness—when you watch your children, when you wake up and smile at each other—that, as our tradition teaches us, is a blessing. People forget that.”

Why do they forget it?

“Because the word ‘commitment’ has lost its meaning. I’m old enough to remember when it used to be a positive. A committed person was someone to be admired. He was loyal and steady. Now a commitment is something you avoid. You don’t want to tie yourself down.

“It’s the same with faith, by the way. We don’t want to get stuck having to go to services all the time, or having to follow all the rules. We don’t want to commit to God. We’ll take Him when we need Him, or when things are going good. But real commitment? That requires staying power—in faith and in marriage.”

And if you don’t commit? I asked.

“Your choice. But you miss what’s on the other side.”

What’s on the other side?

“Ah.” He smiled. “A happiness you cannot find alone.”

Moments later, Sarah entered the room, wearing her coat. Like her husband, she was in her eighties,had thick, whitening hair, wore glasses, and had a disarming smile.

“I’m going shopping, Al,” she said.

“All right. We will miss you.” He crossed his hands over his stomach, and for a moment they just grinned at each other.

I thought about their commitment, sixty-plus years. I thought about how much he relied on her now. Ipictured them at night, holding hands on the edge of the bed.A happiness you cannot find alone.

“I was going to ask you a question,” the Reb told his wife.

“Which is?”

“Well…I’ve already forgotten.”

“Okay,” she laughed. “The answer is no.”

“Or maybe no?”

“Or maybe no.”

She walked over and playfully shook his hand.

“So, it was nice to meet you.”

He laughed. “It was a pleasure.”

They kissed.

I don’t know about forty days before you’re born, but at that moment, it wouldn’t have surprised me to hear two names shouted from the heavens.

(Now the writer is talking about himself)

As a child, I am certain I will never marry out of my religion.

As an adult, I do it anyhow.

My wife and I are wed on a Caribbean island. The sun is going down, the weather is warm and lovely. Her family reads Bible passages. My siblings sing a funny tribute. I step on a glass. We are married by a local female magistrate, who offers us her own private blessing. Although we come from different faiths, we forge a loving solution: I support her, she supports me, we

attend each other’s religious functions, and while we both stand silent during certain prayers, we always say “Amen.”

Still, there are moments: when she is troubled, she asks Jesus for help, and I hear her pray quietly and I feel locked out. When you intermarry, you mix more than two people—you mix histories, traditions, you mix the Holy Communion stories and the Bar Mitzvah photos. And even though, as she sometimes says, “I believe in the Old Testament; we’re not that different,” we are different.

Are you angry with me about my marriage? I ask the Reb.

“Why would I be angry?” he says. “What would anger do? Your wife is a wonderful person. You love each other. I see that.”

Then how do you square that with your job?

“Well. If one day you came and said, ‘Guess what? She wants to convert to Judaism,’ I wouldn’t be upset. Until then…”

He sang. “Until then, we’ll all get alonnng…”

SPRING

Life of Henry (the other guy)

I couldn’t help but compare the Reb and Pastor Henry now and then. Both loved to sing. Both delivered a mean sermon. Like the Reb, Henry had been shepherd to just one congregation his whole career and husband to just one wife. And like Albert and Sarah Lewis, Henry and Annette Covington had a son and two daughters, and had also lost a child.

But after that, their stories veered apart.

Henry, for example, didn’t meet his future wife at a job interview. He first saw Annette when she was shooting dice.

“Come on, six!” she yelled, throwing the bones against a stoop with his older brother. “Six dice! Gimme a six!”

She was fifteen, Henry was sixteen, and he was smitten, totally gone, like those cartoons where Cupid shoots an arrow with aboinngg! You might not view a dice roll as romantic, and it may not seem a fitting way for a Man of God to find a lasting love, but at nineteen, when Henry went to prison, he told Annette, “I don’t expect you to wait seven years,” and she said, “If it was twenty-five years, I’d still be here.” So who is to say what a lasting love looks like?

Every weekend during Henry’s incarceration, Annette rode a bus that left the city around midnight and took six hours to reach upstate New York. She was there when the sun came up, and when visiting hours began, she and Henry held hands and played cards and talked until those hours were over. She rarely missed a weekend, despite the grueling schedule, and she kept his spirits up by giving him something to look forward to. Henry’s mother sent him a letter while he was locked up, saying if he did not stay with Annette, “you might find another woman, but you will never find your wife.”

They were married when he got out, in a simple ceremony at Mt. Moriah Church. He was slim then, handsome and tall; she wore her hair in bangs, and her high smile gleamed in the wedding photos. There was a reception at a nightclub called Sagittarius. They spent the weekend at a hotel in the garment district. Monday morning, Annette was back at work. She was twenty-two. Henry was twenty-three. Within a year, they would lose a baby, lose a job, and see the boiler in their apartment burst in winter, leaving them with icicles hanging from their ceiling.

And then the real trouble started.

The Reb said that a good marriage should endure tribulations, and Henry and Annette’s had done that.

But early on, those “tribulations” were drug abuse, crime, and avoiding the police. Not exactlyFiddler on the Roof. Both Henry and Annette had been addicts, who cleaned up once Henry came home from prison. But after their baby died and the boiler burst and Annette lost her job—and a broke Henry saw his drug-dealing brother with a fat bankroll of hundred-dollar bills—they fell back into that life, and they fell all the way. Henry sold drugs at parties. He sold them from his house. Soon the customers were so frequent, he made them wait on the corner and come up one at a time. He and Annette became heavy users and drinkers, and they lived in fear of both the police and rival drug lords. One night, Henry was taken for a ride with some Manhattan dealers, a ride he thought might end in his death; Annette was waiting with gun in hand if he didn’t come back.

But when Henry finally hit bottom—that night behind those trash cans—Annette did, too.

“What’s keeping you from going to God?” Henry asked her that Easter morning.

“You are,” she admitted.

The next week, he and Annette got rid of the drugs and the guns. They threw away the paraphernalia. They went back to church and read the Bible nightly. They fought back periodic weaknesses and helped one another get through.

One morning, a few months into this rehabilitation, there was a knock at their door. It was very early. A man’s voice said he wanted to buy some product.

Henry, in bed, shouted for him to go away, he didn’t do that anymore. The man persisted. Henry yelled,

“There ain’t nothing in here!” The man kept knocking. Henry got out of bed, pulled a sheet around himself, and went to the door.

“I told you—”

“Don’t move!” a voice barked.

Henry was staring at five police officers, their guns drawn.

“Step away,” one said.

They pushed through his door. They told Annette to freeze. They searched the entire place, top to

bottom, warning the couple that if they had anything incriminating, they had better tell them now. Henry knew everything was gone, but his heart was racing.Did I miss anything? He glanced around.Nothing there. Nothing there—

Oh, no.

Suddenly, he couldn’t swallow. It felt like a baseball was in his throat. Sitting on an end table, one atop the other, were two red notebooks. One, Henry knew, contained Bible verses from Proverbs, which he had been writing down every night. The other was older. It contained names, transactions, and dollar amounts of hundreds of drug deals. He had taken out the old notebook to destroy it. Now it could destroy him. An officer wandered over. He lifted one of the notebooks and opened it. Henry’s knees went weak. His lungs pounded. The man’s eyes moved up and down the page. Then he threw it down and moved on.

Proverbs, apparently, didn’t interest him. An hour later, when the police left, Henry and Annette grabbed the old notebook, burned it immediately, and spent the rest of the day thanking God.

P.S. I'm missing writing. This is just a small attempt to get back to my blog. And this kaput laptop of mine turns me off every time I even try to think bout writing. Let's see if I can.