Becca’s wedding completed a cycle that had started thirty-one years before, almost to the day, on the exact same spot. For both children, their primary responsibility was now to somebody else, not to us. When they arrived safely somewhere, they would call their spouses, not their parents. But seeing them married, to people we liked so much, gave us a wonderful sense of completion. Parenthood is easily the hardest job either of us has ever taken on, but also the most rewarding. Now we could say, “We’ve done it.” Sure there was a sense of loss, but that’s what life is about, letting go. The words of the wedding ceremony, “from this day forward,” had new meaning. Our travels together still had a long way to go, and now our children were starting on their own journeys, joining their own partners, writing their own stories.
CR: At this stage of life, with the children grown and gone, think how sad it would be not to have each other. We’re still able to look at each other in the morning and say, “Gee, I’m glad you’re here.”
SR: Or at least most mornings! Let’s not get too sappy here.
CR: Fair enough. Most mornings. I think the word is devotion. There’s a special level of affection that is based on longevity, on knowing each other well over a period of time and going through many things together, happy and sad.
SR: I think of the day my dad died. Cokie was supporting my mother as we walked down the corridor in the hospital to see my father for the last time. Those moments are as meaningful as walking a daughter down the aisle to be married. I think that there is a great joy in familiarity, and the most obvious sign of that is the way we finish each other’s sentences.
CR: Or don’t even have to begin them. The kids think we’re quite loony. They picture us as these doddering old people, barely managing to make it through the day!
SR: Well, we do give them reason to believe that! We are creatures of great habit.
CR: Humans, you mean.
SR: Humans in general but us in particular. At times in our lives we’ve lived in exotic places and done adventuresome things, and with any luck we’re still able to do that. One of the things I’ve learned in midlife is the importance of accepting new challenges, and the first day I walked into a college classroom at age forty-seven I was taking a long leap off a high board. But I also think at this stage you come to cherish what’s comfortable and ordinary, sometimes in very little things. I plant white geraniums in the same pots every summer so we can see them from the kitchen table, and I’ve told Cokie one of my aims is to fill her life with flowers…
CR:…I’m afraid we’ve become fogies…
SR: We’ve lived in the same house for twenty-two years.
CR: I’ve lived here for forty-seven myself.
SR: We vacation in the same house for the same two weeks in South Carolina every year. The shape of the beach, the smell of the sea. It’s all the same.
CR: We don’t like to make choices. We have to do that all day, every day. We have to decide what stories to write, what people to interview, what’s important, what’s the lead, what words convey the meaning. We also have to be “on” a good bit of the time, to perform. But at the end of the day we want to shut down, have our own time…
SR:…to unplug from all the sockets…
CR: In fact, when a rumor spread recently that our favorite neighborhood restaurant planned to close, I stormed in there and attacked the owner! Don’t you dare do this! We are incapable of change!
SR: And, we’ve learned after all these years, we’re not going to change each other. For all the ways we’ve adapted and the quirks we’ve accepted, we remain different people with different backgrounds. For instance, I will never share Cokie’s experience as a woman, or her education as a Catholic, and occasionally we’ve disagreed so strongly on an issue that we’ve split our newspaper column in half, with each of us writing a different opinion. But the differences show up in personal ways, too.
CR: I was raised in a situation where family members and close friends stayed with us for weeks and even months at a time. I would move into my sister’s room with her and the guests would take my room. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t inconvenience myself for other people. My aunt Tootsie, who had seven children and not much money, had a saying that summed up the family attitude: “If there’s room in the heart, there’s room in the home.” And sure enough, I would sometimes move into her home for the whole summer. That was very different from the way Steven was raised. I don’t think you ever had people spend the night, right?
SR: That was partly because we lived in very cramped conditions. By the time my sister was born, almost every room in our house that wasn’t the kitchen or a bathroom became a bedroom. But basically I agree with you, we grew up with a very different sense of privacy, and it’s taken more than a little adjusting on both sides. I had to learn to be more flexible and Cokie had to learn to be more protective.
CR: But it’s still a source of tension, in fact the greatest source of tension in our marriage. There are times when I feel Steven is being selfish, when he doesn’t want to put himself out. Other times I know he is absolutely right, that if we operated the way I would instinctively operate, we would never have a minute to ourselves, we would be completely overtaken by other people’s demands. But there are still times when I think he’s wrong.
SR: I think at times she allows our lives to be dictated too much by other people. She can push herself to exhaustion with the demands of work and entertaining and caretaking. I love having our home be the center of family events. The portrait of Cokie’s father hangs right there over the dining-room table, a table that has been the setting for so many ceremonies and celebrations. But Cokie has finally learned that our house can’t always be the center. Other people in the family and other friends want the chance to be the host, and not always come to us.
CR: That’s true.
SR: Sometimes there aren’t enough holidays to go around. Our niece Elizabeth, who’s very special to us, is married to a Danish man, Michael Davidsen, and in Danish culture, Christmas Eve is a special time. So they’ve made a big point in the last few years of making Christmas Eve their holiday. Michael cooks a Danish meal and we go through the Danish customs, like finding the nut in the rice pudding. It’s a good example of the next generation saying, “We don’t always want to be the kids, we want to be the grown-ups,” and it’s important to give them that chance.
I’ve discovered that with my students as well. I have a deal with them—when they’re undergraduates and don’t have any money, I always pay when we go out to some campus beer joint. Once they graduate and have jobs and want to take me out to lunch, I will happily accept.
CR: It’s a passage.
SR: I now have students calling up all the time saying, “I can buy you lunch!” Which means, I have a job. One young man, during his first week at his first law firm, took me to lunch and paid with a credit card that was so new, it was glistening. It was a great moment for him. I’ve learned that it would be insulting for me to say, “No, I’ll pick up the check.”
CR: It’s also nice for kids to have adult friends who are not their parents. To have someone who is interested in you and cares about you but does not have the emotional baggage of a parent-child relationship. But it’s good the other way around, too—for us to have young friends who are not our children.
SR: Then there are the four-legged friends. I had never grown up with animals, but our kids let it be known at a young age that they would not be similarly deprived. When Lee and Becca were little, we had the usual assortment of guinea pigs and hamsters; then, even though Cokie is wildly allergic to them, we collected a few cats as well. The move back to America meant the younger generation’s demand for a dog was no longer something we could ignore.
CR: Sebastian, a cute little poodle-terrier mixture from the pound, had hair just like Steve’s. In fact, one night when Steven was away on a trip, he got home earlier than expected and crawled quietly into bed so as not to disturb me. When I turned over and felt this mop of curly hair, I started fussing, “Get out of this bed, you know you’re not supposed to be here.” Steven was somewhat taken aback, to put it mildly. When I realized my bedmate was my husband, not my dog, I thought it was pretty funny.
SR: That dog, Sebastian, was my first animal buddy; he lived with us for seven years and then was killed by a car in front of our house. We waited a little while and then got another dog from the pound, a beautiful female something-or-other who turned out to be completely wild and dreadfully disruptive in the household.
CR: Even so, it was plenty upsetting when a car got her, too, after she’d only been with us for about a month. I said, that’s it. No more dogs. Becca was going to college the next year, and I’d be the one left to train and walk a dog. I absolutely put my foot down. Steven and Becca both walked around for months with long faces calling me the Wicked Witch of the West. So finally I relented: “Okay, you can have a dog if you find one that’s house-trained, likes cats, and can’t jump on our bed.”
SR: Becca scoured the pounds and pet shops and ads in the newspapers and finally found Abner, a three-year-old basset hound no one could describe as cute or beautiful, or smart either. Except he possessed one brilliant trait: he could open the refrigerator door. Cokie hadn’t put that on her list of don’ts. One Thanksgiving he ate an entire ten-pound ham and had to be rushed to the doggie emergency room.
CR: At Becca’s wedding, where he wore a black bow tie with sparkles, I had to surround the cake with a fence of pretty boxes so the dog couldn’t get to it.
SR: Abner always slept on a favorite chair in our bedroom, but as he grew older he couldn’t make the leap up, so he settled for a smelly old bedspread on the floor. After a while he couldn’t make it to the second floor anymore, but he hated to be alone, so he sat at the bottom of the steps and howled until the guilt got too great or the noise too loud and I’d go down and carry him, courting permanent back injury. He had never been the most scrupulous dog about house training, but at the end he was hopeless. Cokie finally put him in Depends, but we spent a good deal of time on our hands and knees doing doggie cleanup. Still, he had such a sweet, dumb disposition and he loved us so unconditionally that we were heartbroken when he died.
CR: Steven was so dear to that dog. You know the old joke, life begins when the kids leave home and the dog dies. But we missed Abner, and Steve wrote a column about caring for the old fella that got the attention of the Basset Rescue folks. They gave us a suitable mourning period and showed up one fine day with Rupert in tow. So here we are again with an unruly hound in our midst, chasing the cat and chewing up books and pillows. At least he can’t open the icebox door. Yet.
SR: Cokie and the kids taught me to love animals; as she said, I had never grown up with them. Another thing that I’ve learned from Cokie is the spirit of charity. Growing up in a more private setting meant that we were more inward looking as a family. My parents were public-spirited, and my father was very involved in local politics and civic organizations and he gave money to causes he cared about. But for Cokie, charity is a part of her everyday life. She practically has a florist on retainer and visits so many hospital rooms she could probably qualify for degrees in several medical specialties. Or at least she thinks she could. I take so much time with my students because of three people: my dad, who was my first mentor; Scotty Reston, who took so much care and time with me; and Cokie, who keeps reminding me of the virtues of serving others.
CR: Steven, who’s a naturally generous and gregarious person, likes to schedule his time. But sometimes things happen which demand attention, regardless of the schedule. It’s not what you planned to do that day—too bad.
SR: On a recent Sunday our newest great-nephew was born. At about eight or nine o’clock we’d just finished dinner, and Cokie announced, “Come on. Let’s go to the hospital, we have to meet William.”
CR: He was only a couple of hours old.
SR: So we did.
CR: It’s easy to convince Steven to throw plans to the winds where our own kids are involved. We miss them so much that we’ll take any opportunity to see them. But we’ve had to adjust to the fact that they have other families who want to see them as well, particularly at holiday times.
SR: Like every couple, when we first got married, we had to work out a holiday schedule. Cokie felt strongly about celebrating the religious holidays with her family, so the Robertses got Thanksgiving. We made it into an annual reunion and tried to spend several days together. After Becca got married, she decided to spend Thanksgiving with Dan’s family, and the first year she was missing was tough for us. In fact, I wrote a column about it called “The Empty Chair at the Table.” It was a sign that they now had obligations to other families. They didn’t belong only with us anymore.
CR: Distance also creates problems. When Lee and Liza moved to London, and couldn’t get home for Christmas, they spent it with my mother in Rome instead. And for the millennium we had this extended family, Liza’s and ours, in Rome together. What could be better?
SR: The year after Lee got married I opened a Christmas card from his in-laws, and there was a picture of their whole family—including Lee! It was a bit of a shock to see my son peering out from another family’s Christmas card!
CR: Our children are also at an age where they can take responsibility for their grandparents, and they’re happy to oblige, as are their spouses. When my mother broke her foot in Rome, Liza and Lee were practically on the next plane from London.
SR: One of the things that made us all feel better about Lindy moving to Rome was that Lee and Liza were only an hour away.
CR: Liza has no living grandparents and after a recent visit with my mother, my daughter-in-law said of her husband’s grandmother, “It’s so special for me to spend time around someone who’s lived that long, to receive her wisdom and have a sense of what her life’s been like.”
SR: It’s also fascinating to watch their careers evolve. In some ways, each of them has gone into the family business. They have remained interested in public policy and politics. But they’ve each grown branches off the family tree. Lee plans and strategizes for an investment bank—which means he analyzes economic and political trends. Becca reports for public radio and television, hardly an odd notion in this family, but she covers technology, a subject neither one of us knows anything about. So both of them are in positions to teach us about what they’re doing, and that’s good for everybody.
CR: But it’s still recognizable. It’s not like they’re scientists or artists, where we’d admire their work but struggle to understand it. And their spouses have sprouted their own branches. Liza’s in the reporting business, for a rival network, and Dan advises cities and states on their finances, so he’s deeply into the political scene.
SR: I remember well our parents traveling to be with us as we moved around the world. And now we’re the ones who travel to see our children. Last summer we met Lee and Liza in Italy, and had one of those lovely Italian lunches in a garden in Tuscany where we sat down at about one-thirty and didn’t get up until four-thirty. We had a similar lunch with Dan and Becca in the Napa Valley wine country. Those are the rare moments in life when you say, “There is no place in the world I’d rather be and nobody I’d rather be with than this group, in this place, right now.”
CR: The trick is making time for those moments. When my father disappeared, I was so young that I didn’t immediately draw a life’s lesson from the experience—too much of life was ahead of me. But my sister’s death at age fifty-one had a profound effect on me. I’m now older than she was then, almost as old as my father was when I last saw him. Their losses at such young ages have taught me the hard way that we mustn’t put off time together, hoping to have more of it in later years. Those years may never come. On the other hand, the fact that my mother took on an interesting new job at the age of eighty-one tells me that the world of work will always be there, if that’s what I want. I know those truths well, but acting on them is not always easy given our demanding world. I need Steven to remind me, to help me live the way I want to.
SR: Some years ago the priest at our nephew Paul’s wedding described marriage as “an unlimited commitment to an unknowable partner,” and that’s true. Marriage is an act of faith, as well as hope. Not every marriage endures, and not every marriage should, we know that. But marriage will never work without that “unlimited commitment” to the future.
CR: When we go to weddings, at least ones where the couple recites traditional vows, we find ourselves becoming awfully sentimental and teary. I’ve noticed that’s true of other long-married couples, who nod their way through the ceremony, squeezing each other’s hand as the bride and groom pledge “to have and to hold, from this day forward.” Those newlyweds can’t possibly know what that promise will mean. We didn’t either, when we said those words under the chuppah that beautiful September night when we were so young. We’ve been incredibly blessed. So far, we’ve lived for better, not worse, richer, not poorer, in health, not sickness. Still, after thirty-three years, we can’t anticipate what will happen from this day forward. But we’re eager to find out.