Several of us attended “On Golden Pond” at the Walnut Street Theater last Sunday afternoon.

Afterwards,  I reflected on a particular scene. "Ethel's" elderly husband, "Norman," had walked outdoors alone to pick strawberries. Suddenly confused and disoriented, he rushed back to the summer house in panic, back to Ethel, his real “place” of security. In that one moment, Norman showed us his agonizing vulnerability to the terror that accompanies memory loss. And we caught a glimpse of what his wife’s long loving meant to him, too, without any of his usual bluffing and blustering.
     In our congregation we have the enormous privilege of worshiping with three couples who have recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversaries. We have one who has just celebrated their 60th, and another who will celebrate their 70th anniversary next summer! I thought of them as I watched the Thayer family dynamics unfold on stage. 
     In the play, you see Norman revitalized by a quirky thirteen year old and an angry, middle-aged daughter who finally struggles to establish a relationship with her father. I heard people commenting on how much "like real life" it all was. And I agree. Life is often like that. But there is another side of "real life" as well. 

   It is the pre-teens in our church who are energized and challenged by the open hearts, enthusiastic service and curious minds of our eldest elders. "Cool," is what they call them. The littler ones are welcomed and indulged by couples who still laugh at each others’ jokes, hug spontaneously, and set each other's needs above their own, even after forty or sixty years of practice. 

    The marriages of our oldest couples sing "hope" to the newlyweds who have only begun to guess what their vows will cost them. The long-married offer a shining demonstration of how love is actually done over the long haul. And when their children and grandchildren come to visit, there is spontaneous hilarity, pride and affectionate teasing among them. It isn't play-acting, either. But everyone watches.

    To see a lanky 79 yr old spontaneously drop on his knee in order to propose all over again to the still-beautiful bride he took sixty years ago, as Dick Gibson did in church a couple of weeks ago, is also "real life." He reminded everyone that romance is not for the young alone, and that the best romance takes years of deliberate loving to create and to sustain.     

I loved the play. And Ethel was right when she quipped, "Old age is what you get when you live a long time." What she didn't say, though, and what the playwrite perhaps did not know, is that the peculiar gifts of old age, including the steadfast love that is the beautiful fruit of a long marriage, is also what you give to others when you've lived a long time.