Friday, December 24

Almost Diamond

More "Rusty" love y'all.


Sonnet's parents celebrate their 49th anniversary the day after Christmas. Grace and Moe (who did, in fact, arrive today) enjoyed their 48th on the 21st and will do so again on the 28th .. two ceremonies - one for the Jews and the other for the Protestants. Integrated they were in a very American way : Moe from University City, St Louis, and a reformed Jewish family and Grace, Upper Arlington, Ohio, where my grandfather a Company Man and every house with a two-car garage and no sidewalk. Grace a "wasp" : white Anglo Saxon protestant who, she notes, "everybody hated during the civil rights movement." My parents broke the mold, met in the first Peace Corps, spent three years in Malawi, then Berkeley California.

In the same spirit, Stan and Silver married shortly after meeting each other in Colorado and moved to Anchorage in '64, weeks before The Great Alaskan Earthquake that lasted five-minutes and the most powerful recorded earthquake in U.S. and North American history, and the second most powerful ever measured by seismograph with a magnitude of 9.2. Silver described the ground "melting." Stan a lawyer and Silver an English Professor at University of Alaska - I met a woman at Gare du Nord who took Silver's course "Women's Autobiography" who told me Silver changed her life. Stan and Silver and Moe and Grace found a way to forge a direction unhindered by legacy. Our parents had a sense of adventure and desire for .. something different. And they got it.