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Thanks , Amy & Lindean!  Brian Doyle's delightful book, Martin Marten has much I'll ruminate on for a long time and one I may well read again. Martin, of the title is actually s marten. It's the first novel I've read with a marten as a significant character. 😏 The book is full of excurses on a wide variety of topics.
    Cosmas, is a humorous character in the story who wears an orange jump suit and rides his bike at breakneck speed down Mt. Hood, where the story is set. Mr. & Mrs. Robinson were an elderly couple whose car went off the road in a snowstorm and there they died together. Later, at their graves Cosmas thinks, or perhaps speaks, this soliloquy.
      Miss Moss is about to connect with Richard (Dickie) in an 'unwedding.'   Now  Cosmas... "She (Miss Moss)  says she wishes more than anything in the world you two (the Robinsons) were there and that she will weep bitterly as she too takes the leap you took toward each other, because that's why she's leaping toward Dickie, because you leapt toward each other every hour of every day, and she saw that and admired that and watched your gentle patience and affection and respect and reverence for each other in every little aspect of your lives, which were of course not little at all, which she says is the greatest lesson she ever learned and which she wants to try to reach with Dickie. She says if she and Dickie  can be anything like you two, then she will account their lives a roaring success..." p. 270

    Isn't that a marvelous description of marriage?   It's a model that Miss Moss want's to emulate even as she plights her troth to Dickie in an unwedding.   "gentle patience and affection and respect and reverence" would that all marriages had a healthy dose of those characteristics.

Takk for alt,


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