Dearly Beloved

 

Well, I've finished my second book for the broaden-my-reading challenge group. This time the category is "a book that was published in the year you graduated from high school." Hmmm. Full disclosure: 1962. I'm officially old.

1962 was the year that Helen Gurley Brown's blockbuster, Sex and the Single Girl, came out. I didn't think I'd benefit much by reading it at this stage*, so I looked to see what else was on the list of best sellers for that year. And came up with this title. I knew nothing about Mrs. Lindbergh apart from the tragic story of the kidnapping. And I'd already read -- back in 1962-63 -- Youngblood Hawke, Franny and Zooey, The Agony and the Ecstasy, and The Prize. So this seemed a good choice.

And it was! I liked this book so very much and I am happy that I didn't read it back in 1962. At eighteen, I wouldn't have understood it at all. It is a book for an older person to read and to savor, to nod with agreement.

It is the wedding day of Deborah and John's daughter, Sally, and the wedding is being held at their home. The book is composed of vignettes, the thoughts of various members of the attendees, though not the bride or the groom. As the minister goes through the old familiar words of the marriage service, different people -- the mother of the groom, the grandfather of the bride, the best man, for example -- initially focus on a phrase and then allow their thoughts to wander off as in tributaries. Early in the book, Deborah recalls her father's saying to her, "Love is a stream, perhaps the stream of life. It is the stream of compassion which feeds the world. When you are in the stream and part of it, it feeds you and everything you do and give is the stream flowing through you . . . ." Each of the following characters talks about his or her place in the stream, but none mention in. 

I think that most of us, when attending a wedding, reflect on our own experience of marriage and that is what happens in this book. People ponder what marriage is through their own lens and each, of course, is different. Age and circumstance impact perception, and Mrs. Lindbergh tells it beautifully. 

Reading the book made me want to know more about the author and her life other than as the wife of the famous aviator. 

I recommend this book to anyone old enough to be a grandmother.

Wonderful quote: "Weddings  . . . expressed the eternal hope of the human race . . . . For a wedding was not only a promise and a pledge made in the eye of God and man; it was a heightening of human life by the addition of something beyond it, something uncertain, intangible, impossible to prove. An assertion of man's belief in a quality of spirit -- love."

*Truth be told, I did read it in 1962 and at eighteen found it fascinating and instructive!