A Good Day Upon the Land

Let me not to the marriage of true minds   
Admit impediments. Love is not love   
Which alters when it alteration finds,   
Or bends with the remover to remove:   
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark, 
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;   
It is the star to every wandering bark,   
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.   
Love ’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks   
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,   
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.   
  If this be error, and upon me prov’d,   
  I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.
     --William Shakespeare (but you knew that)

I'm thinking of some friends of my parents, Ed and Gordon. They were a couple long before I was born, and during all of my growing up they were always spoken of in one breath: "EdandGordon." Ed, who was a stocky, fast-talking, extravagant guy, is the one who introduced himself to strangers at my wedding as "Madeleine's Fairy Godfather" (I would never have said it, but he did, with relish). Gordon was a tall, handsome Texas guy. Ed designed sets for CBS soap operas. Gordon was an executive at a textiles company. And they lived together, as married as two humans could be, for something like fifty years.

For obvious reasons I'm thinking about them today, and I am so, so happy.