Because I have no way of composing the perfect entry for this most sacred of events, the following is a copy of the toast given by my sister Jen (Mom and Dad's oldest child) at their surprise 40th wedding anniversary celebration. Well done Jen. Cheers Mom and Dad!
Forty Years of Love
I thank you, on behalf of my sisters and brothers for coming today. We are here to celebrate forty years of love – forty years of Kathy and Tom, Mum and Dad. My sisters elected me to make the speech. I’ve been fretting over it for awhile now grappling with the emotions I feel contemplating the love my parents have for one another, for all of us, for me. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t get the speech written until last night.
I write this in the coziest room at 595 State Street struggling for the right sentiments, struggling for brevity. I scan the room distracted, procrastinating. My mother’s knitting is at my feet, neatly waiting to be taken up again, ready I think for Monday’s installment of All My Children. My Dad’s crossword is discarded on the coffee table. There’s the bookcase lined with Asimov, Macdonald, Conan Doyle, Kipling. There’s the odd pile of DVDs, mixed in with KTD-era VHS tapes, plucked from some dark recess for Maeve’s and Michael’s entertainment. Are Maeve and Michael sleeping upstairs right now? For there’s the ‘Madeline’ game Pa made and laminated and surely those coloring books and crayons were just used; Michael’s left the train out beside the plastic farm animals.
And now I’m thinking of farms, there’s the framed print of the Annual Christmas Sing at Red Acres; looking long enough at it, I am almost certain I see the “FAs” toasting marshmallows around that bonfire. Other wall - a framed print of buildings on the Stonehill College campus; was it not the proving ground for two teaching careers and the origin-point of a lifelong friendship with John and Jessie, Bob and Paula?
I scan the framed photographs on the sofa table. There is Nana Rafferty on her 90th birthday; Mum with her sisters in Somerset, Pudding Rock; Dad and Uncle Terry (his Best Man) at Eileen and Scott’s wedding. There are my uncles in the dining room of 85 Main and the big group photo of the Clasby and Moore clans taken at a summer cookout a few years back. I give serious consideration to hiding the framed photo-collage of my sisters and me in Locke Dance Studio costumes but opt to “re-position” it behind a photo of Paka, Great Uncle John, and Great Nana Rafferty. It’s then I start reaching deep into cabinets and realize there’s a framed photograph of every one of my cousins. I find old yearbooks and pull them down from the shelves; didn’t my parents first meet at Sacred Heart? Here’s The Corric from 1961. Dad and Dennis Quinn are senior class officers. A sepia-toned photo falls from the pages; it’s my Dad at six or seven years old in a Lone Ranger sweater. And here’s The Corric from 1962; my mother is in student council…a lot of boys have signed this yearbook! And is that Aunt Gret as the May Queen? I move over one shelf and there are the framed photos of Nana and Grampa Moore and the manila envelope that contains Dad’s genealogical research.
It is all here; forty years and more of history documented, archived. I chuckle as I realize you are all so present in this small room at 595 State Street, gathered here tenderly over the years by Mum and Dad. And for love of them, you are here today to help us honor this marvelous achievement; forty years together, forty years of love. Kathy and Tom - Mum and Dad - forty more, please.
