It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon...

I've been reading Garrison Keillor's Life among the Lutherans. It's a collection of his weekly Lake Wobegon updates that all have a story about the Lutherans of the town. I came across a paragraph last night that I wanted to share. I was eating my free Punch Pizza and texting with Josh, who, earlier in the day, had wrapped up the financial arbitration portion of his divorce. I thought it was apropos.

Marital Memorial Day

...and then Arlene looked up over her coffee and said, "You know, there ought to be a Memorial Day for marriages."
"A what?" he said.
"A Memorial Day when we honor those who have been divorced. Our noble fallen."
"Well," he said, "I can think of a few divorced people I wouldn't care to honor."
"Oh," she said, "there were plenty of men who got killed in wars who probably had it coming to them, too, but that's not the point. Marriage is noble. It's admirable and brave and very idealistic for anyone to ever imagine they could live with another person all their life - it's much nobler than going to war and more dangerous - and in the course of things some marriages crash, and others, like ours, pull through, and you know it could've been just just as well as them, so why blame people who failed? All you do is encourage young people to imagine they can learn to avoid mistakes, and that's crazy - life happens to everybody, so why shouldn't there be an event where people who believe in monogamy honor those who tried and went down?"
"Where are you going to hold this?" he asked. "At church?"
She looked at him coolly. "Of course. That's where they got the idea to get married in the first place. Of course it should be in a church. Why not?"
They hadn't gotten much sleep that night, so they took naps that day, and she didn't mention the Marital Memorial Day idea to him again, but he thought about it. He thought, "This could be the idea that, if a brought it up at a church board meeting, would cause them to thank me for my many years of service and I wouldn't have to fund-raise anymore."

I like the idea, but my favorite part was the husband's idea that by bringing this up, he could avoid future church functions. :)