Remembrance of things past (part 17,643)

Today, June 6th, is not only the 73rd anniversary of D-Day in 1944 (young readers should google it) but also the 59th anniversary of the marriage of my dad, Clifford Ray ("Ted") Brague, to Mildred Louise Williams Houston, my stepmother, in 1958.

The wedding took place in the little Methodist Church -- note that I did not say United Methodist Church; that entity did not come into being for another ten years when the big Methodist Church, which itself had been a merger of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church South, and the Methodist Protestant Church in 1939, merged in 1968 with the much smaller Evangelical United Brethren (EUB) -- in Coppell, Texas, way up in the northwest corner of Dallas County. Back then, Coppell was a village of about 600 people with not even one traffic signal. Now its population is estimated to be more than 41,000 human beings and an unknown but surely formidable number of cats, dogs, and other assorted pets. There are lots of traffic signals. The marriage between my dad and my stepmother lasted three months shy of nine years, when my dad succumbed to pancreatic cancer at the age of 60 in March 1967. My stepmother eventually married again to John Wesley Fuller and lived until 2004, passing away at the age of 89.

On that same day in 1958, June 6th, Claire married Dr. Doug Cassen on As the World Turns, a television soap opera loved by my mother when she was alive and also by my new stepmother. It was probably the only thing they had in common.*

I do not know why I remember such things. I just do.

*besides my dad, of course.

suppose a monkey

in a room with a typewriter

had ten million years to come up with the Encyclopædia Britannica

and suppose he/she/it had been at it for sixty years now

you know, the length to date of the reign of a certain monarch who shall remain nameless,

what do you suppose the monkey might have come up with?

maybe something like this:


r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
who
a)s w(e loo)k
upnowgath
PPEGORHRASS
eringint(o-
aThe):l
eA
!p:
S a
(r
rIvInG .gRrEaPsPhOs)
to
rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly
,grasshopper;


or if the monkey had a really high IQ and had been at it for a thousand sixty-year reigns (a feat even the nameless monarch is not expected to achieve), maybe even this:


am was. are leaves few this. is these a or
scratchily over which of earth dragged once
-ful leaf. & were who skies clutch an of poor
how colding hereless. air theres what immense
live without every dancing. singless on-
ly a child's eyes float silently down
more than two those that and that noing our
gone snow gone
yours mine
. We're
alive and shall be:cities may overflow(am
was)assassinating whole grassblades,five
ideas can swallow a man;three words im
-prison a woman for all her now:but we've
such freedom such intense digestion so
much greenness only dying makes us grow


well i suppose anything is possible, but these two offerings

were not made by a monkey,

they are two poems by e.e. cummings

andthatmyfriendsiswhatisknowninsomecirclesasart

[Editor’s note. In other news, today is the 68th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe at the beaches of Normandy in 1944 during World War II. It also happens to be the 54th anniversary of the day in 1958 when my Dad married my stepmother in a small ceremony at the Coppell Methodist Church in Coppell, Texas. It was a Friday evening. Earlier in the day Claire Lowell, Ellen’s mother, married Dr. Doug Cassen on the television soap opera As the World Turns. I’m pretty sure that was just a coincidence. Still, it is true that my stepsister named her second daughter Penny after the character Penny Hughes on the same soap opera. My father died in 1967. My stepmother died in 2004. If you think I know when Claire and Dr. Doug Cassen died, you have another think coming.--RWP]

P.S. -- I hereby dedicate this post to my friend Putz.