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.
