The Vibrant Channeled Creator

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Art by Walter Koessler

Garrison Keillor

This is my favorite story about saying “I love you …” and could easily have been about my Norwegian American parents (now passed, both born before 1920) whom I never saw hug or kiss each other but clearly did love each other through 60-plus years of marriage:
Lena was complaining to Ole on their 50th wedding anniversary that he never said “I love you …” to her on their anniversaries or Valentine’s Day or any other day.
Ole quietly replied, “Lena, on our wedding day 50 years ago, I told you ‘I love you …’ and I also said that I’d let you know if anything changed.”
Stay safe and healthy!
Mark Larson
Arcata, California
My parents were unusually demonstrative for Midwesterners and also for fundamentalists and she often sat on his lap and he kissed her and I think it helped matters that their romance went on for several years of the Depression before finally, thanks to scandal, they married over the opposition of both families. They had to work to achieve the union, it was no casual matter. I clearly remember the one time she was seriously angry at him; I was six or so and I went upstairs to bed, weeping, and she came upstairs to assure me that she didn’t mean what she said. That event is engraved in my mind, the angry words especially, and then her reassurance. Since then numerous women have been furious at me and I have reassured myself with her words: “I didn’t mean it. Everything will be okay.”
GK

A Difference of Fifty-Three Years
by Noel Peattie

Here is a magazine called Seventeen.
It comes out on the stands every month.
The girl on each cover is welcome
as cherry pie; she’s tubbed, pure,
her hair is up, or ribboned.
Her life is all dresses,
parties, and little pink wishes.
She says to the world, Oh hurry,
hurry up, please, and it does.

Here is a man about seventy.
Why isn’t there a journal called Seventy?
Because he isn’t as welcome;
because nobody wants to be like him.
He says to the world, Slow down;
my flat feet can’t keep up with you.
He whispers, I’m still alive.

But it doesn’t slow down, the world.
It keeps on hurrying; for, see there,
an impatient virgin is waiting.

(Every day, an old man is buried).
Every month, there’s another young girl.

“A Difference of Fifty-Three Years” by Noel Peattie, from The Testimony of Doves. © Regent Press, 2005. Reprinted with permission.