From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  SR: That dog, Sebastian, was my first animal buddy; he lived with us for seven years and then was killed by a car in front of our house. We waited a little while and then got another dog from the pound, a beautiful female something-or-other who turned out to be completely wild and dreadfully disruptive in the household.

  CR: Even so, it was plenty upsetting when a car got her, too, after she’d only been with us for about a month. I said, that’s it. No more dogs. Becca was going to college the next year, and I’d be the one left to train and walk a dog. I absolutely put my foot down. Steven and Becca both walked around for months with long faces calling me the Wicked Witch of the West. So finally I relented: “Okay, you can have a dog if you find one that’s house-trained, likes cats, and can’t jump on our bed.”

  SR: Becca scoured the pounds and pet shops and ads in the newspapers and finally found Abner, a three-year-old basset hound no one could describe as cute or beautiful, or smart either. Except he possessed one brilliant trait: he could open the refrigerator door. Cokie hadn’t put that on her list of don’ts. One Thanksgiving he ate an entire ten-pound ham and had to be rushed to the doggie emergency room.

  CR: At Becca’s wedding, where he wore a black bow tie with sparkles, I had to surround the cake with a fence of pretty boxes so the dog couldn’t get to it.

  SR: Abner always slept on a favorite chair in our bedroom, but as he grew older he couldn’t make the leap up, so he settled for a smelly old bedspread on the floor. After a while he couldn’t make it to the second floor anymore, but he hated to be alone, so he sat at the bottom of the steps and howled until the guilt got too great or the noise too loud and I’d go down and carry him, courting permanent back injury. He had never been the most scrupulous dog about house training, but at the end he was hopeless. Cokie finally put him in Depends, but we spent a good deal of time on our hands and knees doing doggie cleanup. Still, he had such a sweet, dumb disposition and he loved us so unconditionally that we were heartbroken when he died.

  CR: Steven was so dear to that dog. You know the old joke, life begins when the kids leave home and the dog dies. But we missed Abner, and Steve wrote a column about caring for the old fella that got the attention of the Basset Rescue folks. They gave us a suitable mourning period and showed up one fine day with Rupert in tow. So here we are again with an unruly hound in our midst, chasing the cat and chewing up books and pillows. At least he can’t open the icebox door. Yet.

  SR: Cokie and the kids taught me to love animals; as she said, I had never grown up with them. Another thing that I’ve learned from Cokie is the spirit of charity. Growing up in a more private setting meant that we were more inward looking as a family. My parents were public-spirited, and my father was very involved in local politics and civic organizations and he gave money to causes he cared about. But for Cokie, charity is a part of her everyday life. She practically has a florist on retainer and visits so many hospital rooms she could probably qualify for degrees in several medical specialties. Or at least she thinks she could. I take so much time with my students because of three people: my dad, who was my first mentor; Scotty Reston, who took so much care and time with me; and Cokie, who keeps reminding me of the virtues of serving others.

  CR: Steven, who’s a naturally generous and gregarious person, likes to schedule his time. But sometimes things happen which demand attention, regardless of the schedule. It’s not what you planned to do that day—too bad.

  SR: On a recent Sunday our newest great-nephew was born. At about eight or nine o’clock we’d just finished dinner, and Cokie announced, “Come on. Let’s go to the hospital, we have to meet William.”

  CR: He was only a couple of hours old.

  SR: So we did.

  CR: It’s easy to convince Steven to throw plans to the winds where our own kids are involved. We miss them so much that we’ll take any opportunity to see them. But we’ve had to adjust to the fact that they have other families who want to see them as well, particularly at holiday times.

  SR: Like every couple, when we first got married, we had to work out a holiday schedule. Cokie felt strongly about celebrating the religious holidays with her family, so the Robertses got Thanksgiving. We made it into an annual reunion and tried to spend several days together. After Becca got married, she decided to spend Thanksgiving with Dan’s family, and the first year she was missing was tough for us. In fact, I wrote a column about it called “The Empty Chair at the Table.” It was a sign that they now had obligations to other families. They didn’t belong only with us anymore.

  CR: Distance also creates problems. When Lee and Liza moved to London, and couldn’t get home for Christmas, they spent it with my mother in Rome instead. And for the millennium we had this extended family, Liza’s and ours, in Rome together. What could be better?

  SR: The year after Lee got married I opened a Christmas card from his in-laws, and there was a picture of their whole family—including Lee! It was a bit of a shock to see my son peering out from another family’s Christmas card!

  CR: Our children are also at an age where they can take responsibility for their grandparents, and they’re happy to oblige, as are their spouses. When my mother broke her foot in Rome, Liza and Lee were practically on the next plane from London.

  SR: One of the things that made us all feel better about Lindy moving to Rome was that Lee and Liza were only an hour away.

  CR: Liza has no living grandparents and after a recent visit with my mother, my daughter-in-law said of her husband’s grandmother, “It’s so special for me to spend time around someone who’s lived that long, to receive her wisdom and have a sense of what her life’s been like.”

  SR: It’s also fascinating to watch their careers evolve. In some ways, each of them has gone into the family business. They have remained interested in public policy and politics. But they’ve each grown branches off the family tree. Lee plans and strategizes for an investment bank—which means he analyzes economic and political trends. Becca reports for public radio and television, hardly an odd notion in this family, but she covers technology, a subject neither one of us knows anything about. So both of them are in positions to teach us about what they’re doing, and that’s good for everybody.

  CR: But it’s still recognizable. It’s not like they’re scientists or artists, where we’d admire their work but struggle to understand it. And their spouses have sprouted their own branches. Liza’s in the reporting business, for a rival network, and Dan advises cities and states on their finances, so he’s deeply into the political scene.

  SR: I remember well our parents traveling to be with us as we moved around the world. And now we’re the ones who travel to see our children. Last summer we met Lee and Liza in Italy, and had one of those lovely Italian lunches in a garden in Tuscany where we sat down at about one-thirty and didn’t get up until four-thirty. We had a similar lunch with Dan and Becca in the Napa Valley wine country. Those are the rare moments in life when you say, “There is no place in the world I’d rather be and nobody I’d rather be with than this group, in this place, right now.”

  CR: The trick is making time for those moments. When my father disappeared, I was so young that I didn’t immediately draw a life’s lesson from the experience—too much of life was ahead of me. But my sister’s death at age fifty-one had a profound effect on me. I’m now older than she was then, almost as old as my father was when I last saw him. Their losses at such young ages have taught me the hard way that we mustn’t put off time together, hoping to have more of it in later years. Those years may never come. On the other hand, the fact that my mother took on an interesting new job at the age of eighty-one tells me that the world of work will always be there, if that’s what I want. I know those truths well, but acting on them is not always easy given our demanding world. I need Steven to remind me, to help me live the way I want to.

  SR: Some years ago the priest at our nephew Paul’s wedding described marriage as “an unlimited commitment to an unknowable par
tner,” and that’s true. Marriage is an act of faith, as well as hope. Not every marriage endures, and not every marriage should, we know that. But marriage will never work without that “unlimited commitment” to the future.

  CR: When we go to weddings, at least ones where the couple recites traditional vows, we find ourselves becoming awfully sentimental and teary. I’ve noticed that’s true of other long-married couples, who nod their way through the ceremony, squeezing each other’s hand as the bride and groom pledge “to have and to hold, from this day forward.” Those newlyweds can’t possibly know what that promise will mean. We didn’t either, when we said those words under the chuppah that beautiful September night when we were so young. We’ve been incredibly blessed. So far, we’ve lived for better, not worse, richer, not poorer, in health, not sickness. Still, after thirty-three years, we can’t anticipate what will happen from this day forward. But we’re eager to find out.

  Afterword

  Since we finished this book, some interesting things have happened to the people you’ve just read about. We write that four couples had gotten married in our yard—us, our daughter, Steve’s brother, family friends. Now there is a fifth. Our niece Jenna Roberts married Andy Mammen (they met as medical students at Johns Hopkins) on the same spot in May 2000, and that evening marked several firsts. It was the first Quaker wedding at Bradley Boulevard, with guests standing as the spirit moved them to speak during the ceremony. And it was the first time that it rained. But the tent held up and all was well.

  After we described how Justice Arthur Goldberg spoke at our wedding as an “elder” of the Jewish tribe, we got a call from his great-great niece. She was marrying a non-Jew and wanted to use “Uncle Arthur’s” words in her ceremony. So we sent them along, and just recently received several photographs of the happy couple. Our nephew Steve Sigmund is planning to marry a Jewish woman and has asked his Uncle Steve to play the “elder” role at their ceremony. The two Steves often attend Yankee baseball games together and a ceremonial first pitch might be added to the traditional glass breaking.

  During our book tour Steve often told the story of the “book of poems” that made its way from Europe to America and wound up uniting Sam and Norma Weiss in a sixty-three-year-marriage. One night C-SPAN covered our appearance at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, and the morning after the talk was broadcast our phone rang. “My name is Mel Weiss,” said the fellow on the line, “and the book of poems story is about my parents.” Steve had never met Mel, who was very gracious. When Cokie spoke at a synagogue near their beach home in New Jersey, Mel and his wife attended her talk.

  We got another call from a woman named Yaffa Eliach, who has written a book, There Once Was a World, about Eishyshok, the home village of Steve’s grandmother, where the book of poems story took place. “Your family is in my book,” she told Steve, but he insisted they weren’t. He’d already looked them up. You’re spelling your grandmother’s name wrong, she said, it’s “Vasilishki” not “Wasilsky.” Sure enough, there is a Berl Vasilishki in the book, described as a “shtetl medicine man and horse expert.”

  Then there is Lilly Friedman, who wore the white wedding dress made from a German silk parachute in a displaced persons camp in early 1946. The dress went on display at the Holocaust museum in December 1999, and just before the event Steve called her. Lilly told him that her father, Rabbi Yitzak Lax, who died at Auschwitz, was born on the fifth day of Chanukah, a joyous Jewish holiday that lasts eight days. So even though the holiday falls on a different date each year, the Friedman family always remembers the rabbi on the fifth night with special prayers. Steve was taken aback. “Don’t you realize,” he told Lilly, “that the ceremony opening the exhibit falls on the fifth night?” Lilly was shocked and pleased. Several dozen of her relatives came to Washington for the event, filling a bus by themselves. With twenty-one grandchildren, and a new great-grandchild, Lilly has fulfilled the biblical admonition to “be fruitful and multiply.” We wrote in our column that week: “As we light our candles on the fifth night of Chanukah, we will add an extra one for Rabbi Yitzak Lax, for his sons who died with him, for his daughters who survived, and for the generations he never lived to see.”

  Many people who read the book or heard us talk about it wanted to share their own stories of love and marriage, including the young couple who approached us one Saturday night as we were coming out of the movies in our neighborhood. The woman was shaking, on the edge of tears. “It’s incredible,” she blurted out. “We just finished reading your book and decided this afternoon to get married.” Steve was touched, but Cokie was less sentimental. “I don’t want to take responsibility for their marriage,” she muttered.

  We’re particularly pleased when readers want to give this book to others. One man at a book signing in Charlottesville, Virginia, was buying four copies, one for each of his children. A TV producer told us that her mother in San Francisco couldn’t get her father to read it. Mom solved the problem by buying the taped version and playing it for Dad while he was trapped in the car on a long trip.

  A Jewish woman gave the book to her brother, who was about to marry a Catholic, and then sent us a note saying: “The priest who they talked to told them to read it because it was a good source on mixed couples.” A rabbi in Florida wrote that he was giving the book to young couples who came to him for advice: “It really forces people to deal with the seriousness of commitment and the potential rewards of union.” A friend attended a wedding in Boston, where the celebrant read from the book as part of the service. A minister from Los Angeles told us that he and his wife read portions aloud to each other. That sounds a little weird, frankly, but we’re glad they enjoyed it.

  One of the reasons we wrote the book was to shore up young people who are surrounded by failed marriages but still have an elemental yearning for their own mates and matches. So we were heartened by the letter from David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, codirectors of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers: “We talk to so many young people who are searching for good models and inspirational stories of marriage to encourage and instruct them but who find only bad models and cautionary stories of divorce. From This Day Forward makes a tremendous contribution to changing all that.”

  Not all the reactions have been so favorable. A woman from Staten Island wrote about our children: “To say you brought them up in both religions does not make sense. True, tradition is a part of religion. But if the children are baptized Catholic, then they are not Jewish. Likewise, if they are not baptized, then they are not Catholic.” Some Jewish readers expressed similar views, that mixed couples have to choose one tradition or another, and can’t be both. We respectfully disagree, but we also recognize that our way of doing things is not the only way. Every couple has to find their own answers.

  In writing the book we came to realize that all marriages are mixed marriages, starting with those between a man and a woman. The whole notion that differences between religions are greater than the differences between genders is ridiculous. All relationships make the same journey and meet the same obstacles. They just take different paths to the same place. As one old friend of Cokie’s, a mother of three living in Pittsburgh, wrote of the book: “Its message is so simple: we married people are human, we fall down on the job occasionally, we pick ourselves up, and keep on trying to love each other.”

  That’s it exactly. A typical letter came from a man who’s been married fourteen years: “Like you we have a mixed marriage (she is Jewish and I’m Lutheran). We are the only ones in our circle of friends who are married longer than five years. A few are into their second and third marriages. A few years ago I heard a great quote (unfortunately I cannot remember the author). It went something like this: ‘The problem with divorce in this country is that it is not an effective deterrent to marriage.’ A lot of folks in long marriages feel a bit under siege these days, but a bad marriage will not deter many people from trying again, and it shouldn’t. The rewards are worth th
e risk.”

  A woman from Atlanta put her reaction this way: “With satisfaction, I listened to you talk of your mixed marriage. We are a blending of Protestant and Judaism and have spent the last thirty years explaining to others how it is possible to succeed without anyone losing something. In many ways I believe we have a more meaningful faith.” We agree. But just so we wouldn’t feel too smug our correspondent added: “I seldom agree with your political views, but I do respect your sense of family and traditions.”

  One of Steve’s former students, a Protestant, assigned the book to her Jewish boyfriend: “After that, I’ll pass it on to my parents, so we’ll all have a base to start from. It was interesting to read your story because it reflected so many of the things my parents have told me about their marriage and life, but it’s different to hear it from someone else. Kind of like you say at the end—it’s nice to have older friends who aren’t your parents.” By the way, it’s nice to have younger friends who are not your children. Months after the first note we got a second one: the couple is now engaged! Perhaps we should send them the e-mail we got from the older brother of another student, five weeks after his wedding to a woman of another faith. We’d urged him to plan the ceremony “with a sense of inclusion not exclusion,” and he wanted us to know how well things had gone: “Your message about ‘inclusion’ hit home, and as we all found out, it is truly the best way to go!”