In Biblical times, a certain young king married a princess from a neighboring country. Soon after their marriage it became necessary for the king to leave his young wife and lead his armies into battle. One night before he left, the king was walking in the palace gardens. He stood beside the moon-drenched pool tossing pebbles into the water and watching the circles form. “How like a circle is my love for her,” he thought. “it, too, has no beginning and no ending!”
The next day he called in his goldsmith and directed him to make a gold circle to fit the queen’s finger. When the king slipped the finished ring on his wife’s finger, he told her, “The circle, which has no beginning and no ending, is a pledge of my love for you, which is also eternal.” And down through the ages, the gold circle has sealed the vows of marriage and symbolized the purity and the endlessness of love.
Wed.: 8 P.M., 3 NOV 1971
Dearest LC and Fruc,
For once, my wife and I are denying ourselves of the jealousy we always secretly bear, the jealousy of the very sweet love you always have for each other. Somehow your fiery but solid relation to each other is always the ideal we ourselves really aspire to attain. My wife and I have been constant witness to the uniqueness of your desires and love, since the two of you met 10 years ago by a spark of good luck. That first time, we saw the two of you suddenly mutually drawn to each other, as tho one had been dormant unborn for 30 thousand years to wait with hope, patience and wisdom for the conception and birth of the other; then at the right time the moment of strong union just happened at full bloom.
We have seen the 2 of you holding hands, walking long distances every day so that you could lengthen the day. You were not thinking of the future, you were not planning for the future, for with your love’s kind, the present is all that matters and it includes in itself whatever is the future. We had known the first lovely seed of your love who came out perfect as a carefree child of love & nature on Nov. 17. We had seen and felt the heavy grief you bore one June 24, when your first love flower fell off from your hold. We had witnessed the two of you withstanding and recovering only to bear just another seed of equal beauty. In short, we have known you to persist obstinately, as if saying that with true love, nothing, not even death or time could try the two of you. And so, for the very force of your love for each other, despite our inherent jealousy of you, my wife and I cannot but greet you on your first decade of triumphant loving. Please accept our small gift. May your day of Nov. 17, 1971 be one of robust party. The two of you are really the very kind of man and wife we do hold high to emulate.
Yours truly,
‘Ethel’ & fg
June 17th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
I came across this post whilst still unpublished when I was skimming through the drafts yesterday and, seeing as how it moved me, wondered why it was so. I’m glad I refrained from publishing it though, Mai, as the honors of making an entry as special as this must certainly belong to no one else but you.
June 18th, 2008 at 8:28 am
Faye,
I had already typed this entry, hit a button accidentally, and ‘lost’ it, or so I thought. I’d have looked in the ‘drafts’ section, but we were already leaving at the time for SM. Later, it seemed easier to just re-type rather than go through the maze of WordPress changes, so I did.
Thanks for just letting matters be and allowing me to post Den’s letter to our alter-egos, LC and Fruc. LC stands for ‘Listening Center’, where we first met. Den called me like that later when he was in a tender, reminiscing mood, perhaps also because it sounded like ‘Elsie’. Fruc is of course ‘Fructuoso’, Den’s nom-de-plume.
For all their dark moods sometimes, this is one of the advantages of being married to poets-writers–they are eternally creative, and one never really knew what to expect from them.
Mai