Amongst many things,
my mother taught me the dangerous but timely lesson
that there is a love seemingly beyond love,
beyond our control, and it will take us through our lives
bestowing blessings and curses as they fall.
It will set you on fire,
confuse you,
drive you to passion and extreme deeds,
and may smite the reasonable, modestly loving parts
of who you are.
Love has a
great deal to do with humility.
In my parents' love, there was
kindness,
a beyond-human compassion, an anger,
a compulsive
fidelity, a generosity, and an
unconditionality that scorched everything in its path.
It was exclusive. It was not humble.
It was their love.
-Bruce Springsteen
I arrived on the scene in the winter of 1967. I was the sixth and final member of the Kenny Sibling Sextet. Dad turned forty-three less than two months before I was born. Mom turned thirty-nine slightly more than four months after I was born. Immediately prior to my birth, their oldest child, Bill, was fifteen, and their youngest child, Jill, had just turned two.
Mom and Dad married on this very day in 1951. Although WPK, Sr. and I spent a relatively brief amount of time together as father and son (he died slightly less than four months after I turned fourteen), even in my earliest recollections of him, he already seemed old. It was the white hair and the bad heart, I suppose. He was fifty-seven when he died, which he did ten days shy of their thirtieth anniversary and two weeks shy of Mom's birthday.
On the day Dad died, Mom was fifty-two. She had been just twenty-two on their wedding day. She lived as a wife for thirty years. She would live as a widow for thirty-six. She was eighty-eight when she died, which she did six days shy of what would have been their sixty-sixth anniversary and ten days shy of her birthday.
I know not whether I am the only person who has this difficulty but I have always had a very difficult time visualizing my parents at any time in their lives prior to when they became my parents. It is for that reason that among the treasures unearthed when Jill, Kara, and I cleaned up Mom's apartment in Jupiter, Florida after she died were the photographs from her wedding day that she had saved for more than six decades.
Mom and Dad on their Wedding Day
June 9, 1951
In this photograph, they are frozen forever in time as I never knew them - a young couple in their twenties with their whole life literally and figuratively ahead of them. Their eyes reveal the presence of their dreams and expectations without revealing their identity. When I look at this photograph, I find myself wondering what those dreams and expectations were and how many of them were realized. Questions to which I shall never know the answers.
Mom and Dad on their Wedding Day
June 9, 1951
Without knowing for sure, I have presumed since first seeing this photograph that it is of Mom and Dad cutting their wedding cake. Truthfully, my presumption is based entirely upon the fact that - seemingly by deliberate design - each of them is looking down and not at the camera...and upon the fact that WPK, Sr., from whom I inherited my ineptitude for the performance of all things mechanical, appears to be grinning through gritted teeth. His facial expression suggests to me that he was performing a task outside of his comfort zone when this photograph was taken and that he was perhaps a bit self-conscious about his cake-cutting skills...
...as I would be on my wedding day, forty-two years later.
-AK
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