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Thirty-Fifth
Anniversary
““To
every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose
under the heaven; A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance.”
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Ecclesiastes
III |
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Dear Ornament
Reader,
The New Year is dawning and affords us the opportunity
to continue the celebration of our thirty-fifth anniversary year,
from 2009 to 2010, with our beginnings dating back to May 1, 1974.
Also we will mark another lovely springtime day, for the celebration
of life, as we progress to May 14, for that day for my mother, Kathryn
Macut Benesh, will be her ninetieth birthday. Mom has lived well her
many ninety seasons and shown us by example the manifold beauties
of laughing and dancing, mourning and weeping.
My father always said, with varying emotional tonalities from great
appreciation to distressingly rueful, that my mother lived in the
moment. I have never quite gotten a handle on what that meant, because
of my own private nature and from my profession as an editor and publisher.
My life is a moving landscape, emanating from the past, flowing to
the present, anticipating the future. It is in many ways an observational
life, viewing the world and our life experiences through a prism that
the past, present and future might mean to me.
I also understand how misleading this interpretation can be. Essayist
Francis Bacon wrote: “The human understanding is like a false
mirror, which, receives rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the
nature of things.” But for Mom there are no false mirrors and
today, I finally got it. For my mother, the lived moment is happiness.
It is unmitigated pleasure, pure and abundant. It is reality. It is
cosmic. It is God.
This
is a great gift given each day to her children, her grandchildren,
her network of relationships over a vast lifetime, whether it is her
closest family and friends or someone she just met on a plane, like
last year when she and I were returning from her home in Monroe, Michigan,
to her home in San Marcos, California. After a long conversation she
initiated with the fellow in the row behind us, I was tapped on the
shoulder by him, and he said, awestruck: “Your mother is remarkable.”
I replied, “Yes, I know; she is like that all the time.”
This
exquisite quality has taken her to worlds beyond her own. Besides
being an active partner in the manufacturing enterprises that she
and my father shared, she was a wife for nearly seventy-one years
until my father died in 2006, at ninety, while they were on a trip
to Croatia to visit family. She is mother to four children, Mary Ann,
Peter, Carolyn, and Eve, and grandmother to Mark, Jennifer, Janet,
Eduard, and Patrick. While we ourselves are in our senior years, mother
shows no evidence of noticing such incidentals, but rather concentrates
on the love, beauty and brilliance that her children and grandchildren
bring to her life.
For nearly all her years, educational, fraternal, health, political,
and religious organizations consumed her life. A passionate cook,
she has made meals for hundreds of people at one seating, deeply satisfied
each time with feeding the multitudes. For someone who so dearly lives
in the moment, her life has been selflessly focused on others and
whatever their needs might be.
I am helpless to adequately describe her unique essence, what makes
the quintessential Kathryn. But my heart is another matter; to this
moment, it beats with simple, profound love. Thank you, Mom, and Happy
Birthday this coming May 14. We will be with you to celebrate your
good and gracious life.