The Anniversary

That my parents have been married for 50 years seems a miracle to me, through ups and downs, fights and messes they have stayed together, until this golden wedding anniversary and possibly beyond.

I could only celebrate them this way: I found this old photo, them on the beach in Fregene, the sand, the horizon, and that’s it, maybe an April many many years ago, my father says my sister and I were not even born – a kind of mythical prehistory.

I scanned it, adjusted, cropped, enlarged and framed it, and applied gold, two stars in the coming sky, and an endless beach. One needs to have loved at least once in this life, to step out of one’s self even for a moment, to understand perhaps its most authentic premise.