Rant #1,623: The Big 6-0

I can't wait to get through with today, because tomorrow, my family and I have something really special to do.

After being postponed due to weather conditions--you might remember the snow we had several weeks ago that knocked us all out for one Saturday in January--my family and I are finally going to be celebrating my parents' 60th wedding anniversary, which was actually way back on January 22.

We had planned to have this celebration, but the snow came, and everything had to be canceled.

Funny, the weather is not supposed to be that great today and into the early weekend, but it won't be as bad as before, so we are going ahead with this thing.

If not, we might as well postpone the whole thing altogether, and wait for their 65th wedding anniversary.

Anyway, the big day is tomorrow, we have friends and family coming from all over to celebrate with us, and my sister said I am supposed to make a big speech when we toast my parents for their longevity and their long marriage.

In anticipation that I would, in fact, have to make a speech, I decided to go whole hog with it, and since you readers are so loyal to me, I am going to give you a sneak peak at what I have written.

Sure, it is kind of long, but how short can one go talking about 60 years of wedded bliss?

I don't know if I will state every word written here, but at least it gives me an outline, lest I mess up and lose my train of thought.

So here it is, unedited:

"Sixty years … where do I begin?

I guess I have to start in the old butcher shop on the Lower East Side, where through some type of meeting of the minds, some people got together and decided that they had just the right nice Jewish girl for my father.

According to the stories I have heard, it sounds more like they were choosing pieces of pastrami for my father rather than a human being:

“One with fat?”

“How about one with less fat?

“How about one that is lean?”

My father finally got the lean pastrami, so to speak, and the rest is history.

Whatever happened happened, and a match from heaven was made between two complete opposites: one from the gritty Lower East Side of Manhattan, a proud Marine who was a Yankees fan that my mother has repeatedly told me dressed like a gangster on their first date, and the other from hoity toity Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, who was a Dodgers fan and the girl my father repeatedly has told me was the one he knew he was going to marry from the get go.

They shared their faith, they had similar values, and they learned to love each others’ little quirks.

OK, they got married, and somehow, a little bit later, I was thrown into the mix.

I have been told that I was a pretty horrid little kid. I got into everything, I was gregarious and curious about the world … my mother tells a story that I was acting up in a local store, and she was very pregnant with my sister. On the checkout line, an old fuddy duddy came up to her and said, “After this”—pointing to me running around the store and then pointing to my mother’s tummy—“you decided to have another one?”

My mother was in tears. Her little Larry was an angel, even though he was really “Larry the Menace.”

And when my sister came into the world, my mother sat me down, told me that I had to be more responsible, and suddenly, almost overnight, I was.

This does not mean that I totally reformed.

When my mother calls me “Lawrence,” I know I am in for it.

And I was in for it during the famous “foul mouthed” incident, where the older kids in the neighborhood—probably seven or eight years old--taught me some dirty words. I repeated every one of them—later to be known as George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words”--to my mother verbatim as if they were the King’s English and as I had been taught them by these juvenile delinquents, and my mother’s face turned as red as ketchup.

For my deed, I got my mouth washed out with soap—I still taste the soap, and whatever the brand—whether it was Zest or Dial--it does not taste too good.

There was the famous “Carla” incident, where a bully—a girl bully who was a year older than me and about four heads taller than I was—was beating me up every day and my father finally had to have a word with me. He said, “If she punches you, you punch her back!” I got beat up again. He takes me aside, and says, “I thought I told you to punch her back?” I went outside, and got beat up again.

He spoke to me again. “Look, I told you to punch her back. You better listen to me this time. Who are you more afraid of, me or her?” I replied: “HER.”

There were so many other incidents that happened over the years, but my parents were always there for me, through thick and thin. They never wavered, supported me 100 percent on most things, and I have to say that they still support me through the rigors of adulthood.

My mother gave me my freedom of thought, my artistic ability as a writer, and my clarity of vision—even though I have needed glasses seemingly my entire life. My father gave me my competitiveness, my stubbornness, and my love of sports —I was a terrible athlete, but I tried harder than anyone else.

And they both gave me a sense of family, that family is the most important thing one can have, and that family comes first … as well as the Yankees, of course.

They supported me when I went through a divorce. They supported me when I went to school—thanks to my mother, who went through the Spanish dictionary with me numerous times and even went over Shakespeare with me--and they supported me when I made my career choices—I think my father wanted an accountant because he did not get along with Cousin Joe, but he settled for a writer.

They supported me by creating a nice home to live in, and they supported me when I needed a shoulder to cry on.

They supported my sister and my choices for spouses, and they consider both Elena and Bob their children, too. So, my father did get his four children after all, in a funny way.

No, we don’t always see eye to eye on everything—my father the former chicken butcher has a son who hates chicken with a passion--but I even knew as a kid that I couldn’t have asked for better parents, and this 58 year old still knows how lucky I really am.

What we kind of forget about, or don’t truly realize, is that they were progressive parents without even striving to be so.

People talk about diversity today, but more than 50 years ago, my parents actually did something about it. They took my sister and I out of Kew Gardens Hills to a new development called Rochdale Village in South Jamaica, Queens. This was not only new in structure but new in focus, and to me, it was the greatest place a kid could ever grow up in—a place where everyone, no matter who they were or what they were, were on an even keel, and Rochdale Village was the place I can say my parents took a chance on and we all benefited from living there--even when we all faced dark days and left for greener pastures on Long Island.

Both my parents and I still have friends from the old neighborhood, and I really respect the fact that my father and mother wanted better for their children, whether we lived in Queens or when we moved out here to Long Island, and they often made sure Gail and I had better by making great personal sacrifices to reach that goal.

Consistency is a virtue, and things haven’t changed much, from the time I was in diapers to now, when I wear regular underwear. Moving to the present time, my sister and I have grown from little kids to responsible adults, and then into parents, and as grandparents, my parents have also grown, and are absolutely second to none to their grandchildren.

I have to say they learned well, because their parents—my own grandparents—I felt were the most fantastic four people that I have ever met. Family always came first with them, and family always comes first with my parents, and their five grandchildren are No. 1 in their lives, no matter what.

Sixty years is a long, long time, but I really feel it is only a beginning for these two mismatched people who somehow got together and are the matriarch and patriarch of our small family.

They have so much more to do—whether my father being the first 100 year old cab driver or my mother knitting her 10,000th sweater in a long knitting career—

Heck, wait until the great grandchildren come onto the scene, who knows when, but I guarantee that they will be there for them, support them and love them to the hilt.

Love really is a many splendored thing.

Congratulations to my parents, I couldn’t have chosen any better."

Speak to you again on Monday.