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.” Ecclesiastes III

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.