A Love Letter on Our Thirty-Fifth Wedding Anniversary

​Dear Mahmoud:
 
Happy 35th anniversary! (since our wedding on June 25, 1988!)
 
When I was 16, I came across an article that struck me—one where the (female) author made an intriguing conjecture about women:
 
“Unconsciously,” she said, “We don’t want to marry someone just like our fathers; we actually want to marry someone just like our mothers.”
 
Hmmm. Was that true—at least for a good number of us women? I pondered its meaning for thirty seconds or so. But somehow the notion remained in my head.
 
Seven years later my mother died at 54, and six years after that I met you.

And that’s when I understood the author’s words. I had fallen in love with someone—a sweet man from Iran—with something in his makeup that reminded me of my mother!

It isn’t just that you’re a nurturer by nature, just like Mom was in her strong, yet understated way.
 
And it isn’t just that you’re generous to a fault, by which you freely give away your time, talents, and acts of service, like Mom did.
 
It also lies in the uncanny and quirky coincidence of qualities you share—I mean, my darling Mom and the darling man I married:

• How can it be that Mom smugly used to keep her so-called “secret stash” of cookies at home in plain sight—knowing full well that no one else in the household would be tempted to snitch from her intentional selection of oatmeal raisin cookies--a variety no one else liked but her? And that decades later, even without knowing that history, you resorted to that same fiendish little tactic—even down to choosing that same unpopular variety of cookie?  
• How can it be that, despite your both being people of relatively few words, you can “tell it to me straight” when I least expect it—and be annoyingly right about it, precisely like Mom could. And yet, even in the blunt delivery of your telling, I knew I could trust your intention and wisdom.
• How can it be that, when Mom was on this side of the world and you were still on that side, you were each pondering and judiciously sharing the works and words of Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, Jesus Christ, Maya Angelou, Mohammad, and other prophets, poets, activists, and philosophers?
• How can it be—as it was with Mom—that there are few things you like doing more, or making time for, than planting something outside, somewhere—working the good earth, tilling the soil, getting dirty and sweaty, and making beautiful flowers happen? Especially if those flowers are roses or peonies?
• And how can it be that the year Mom died (1977) was the very same year you arrived at the States?

 
Had Mom been alive, I believe she would have been the first in my family to understand that you were for me.
 
And you were the first between you and me to find Mom’s graveside again when we returned from Iran after four years away.
 
The truth is—without ever having met, you are kindred spirits in my eyes, and you both still bloom in my heart.
​
How deeply and gratefully I celebrate you both on our thirty-fifth (coral) anniversary!