I came across this in Given Poems. He calls it "They."
I see you down there, white-hairedToday Melinda and I have been married 38 years. Her hair is not white, although mine is moving that direction. Just last week I saw her across a row of ripe blackberry's at Jay Pullin's farm outside of Floresville. It is difficult to put into words what it means to remember being younger. Further down the row of berry vines my oldest son and his wife were also picking the fruit, as were their children.
among the green leaves,
picking the ripe raspberries,
and I think, "Forty-two years!"
We are the you and I who were
they whom we remember.
When I imagine that scene, I realize that we were once where those small children are. We were once where that young couple is. And now we are older. We don't return to that younger time except in memory, and frankly, I don't want to. I like being who I am, where I am in life, though it means that the days yet before me are considerably fewer than those that lie behind.
These two people, Melinda and I, are the they whom we remember. We knew of each other as far back as seventh grade, but we were not yet friends. By the time we went to high school we were sharing a lunch table and getting to know each other a bit. Then Melinda joined the forensics team our senior year and we rode a bus to San Antonio for a speech and drama tournament and sat next to each other and talked all the way there and back. Around Christmas a few of us at church decided it would be fun to get dates and go out to eat at Jimmy Walker's Restaurant in Kemah (no boardwalk back in those days -- just Jimmy Walker's). I assumed that Melinda was dating a guy named Chuck, and so was unavailable. I asked someone else to go with me and she said no. I was going to back out. Then I worked up the courage to call Melinda and she said yes. Since December 19, 1970, (Forty-two years!) we've been together.
Three and a half years after that first date, a week out of college, we married. Three months later we moved from Houston to Ft. Worth to begin seminary studies. Melinda taught school and I went to school. We would eventually move ten times. There would be three children, lots of joy, churches to serve, struggles to endure, friends to share, memories to make. She would have to put up with so much. We would nurse our parents through their illness and old age and see them cross over to the other side. We would parent together, travel together, and serve Christ together. Now I'm teaching school and she's a student. Children are out on their own, for the most part. We are learning to grandparent.
As often as I officiate at a wedding, I think, "These two standing before me have no idea what they are doing, what they are in for. They cannot possibly know the meaning of the words they speak." ' 'til death do us part.' Neither one of them has considered that one of them will someday stand by a grave and walk the journey alone for a while. "For better, for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness as in health, to love and to cherish." Do they, can they, possibly understand what that will require? How difficult that might be? No, they don't. They can't be expected to. But we make those promises and let them orient us toward the way we live out the years together.
I remember those two younger people well. But it is these two, older, wiser (?), less naive about what is necessary to love, that I know.
"We are the you and I who were
they whom we remember."















