NZ Visual Diary - Anniversary Interlude

Rich & Randolph - wedding eve [1 August 1980]

[This essay was written and then posted on Facebook in celebration of my 35th wedding anniversary. I enjoyed reading it again some ten years later.]

Crossing Delancey is one of my favourite movies. Peter Riegert plays the role of Sam Posner, a second (third?) generation pickle shop owner in the Lower East Side of New York City. It’s a wonderful play-turned-film, but I would have liked it anyway. I am a Peter Riegert fan. Yes, he’s a talented actor, worthy of roles other than Donald 'Boon' Schoenstein in the movie Animal House. Riegert hails from Ardsley, New York and Peter and I went to high school together.

Well, not exactly. Back in the day, Ardsley High School was a combined junior high/high school, with students in grades 7-12 sharing those hallowed halls. Peter was a senior (grade 12) when I was a 7^th grader. I greatly admired Peter (and worshipped his dear Dee Joyce, but that’s another story, one surely on the theme of unrequited love). It was no surprise to anyone that Peter had the leading role in the high school Senior Play or would gone on to pursue a successful career on stage and screen.

There is a moment in Crossing Delancey as the charming but unrequited lover Sam Posner courts Isabelle Grossman (played by Amy Irving). In that scene, Isabelle says to Sam “You’re a really nice guy.” Sam winces. And all of us 'really nice guys' grimaced with him. We knew that in romance the phrase 'really nice guy' is always the antecedent to a proposition, the unwanted declaration before the conjunction of despair: “You are a really nice guy, but I won’t go on another date with you.”

I was that really nice guy. I enjoyed being the really nice guy, thanked my parents for raising me to be that really nice guy, but (note the conjunction of despair) wanted to be something more than ‘Richie, that really nice guy.’ Like Sam Posner, I knew that being that really nice guy was important, indeed fundamental, and yet insufficient.

I believe few, if any of us, become really nice persons without the help of others. And yet, few, if any of us, also become something more than decent human beings without the help of family, friends and wonderful teachers. I have been blessed by being son, brother, father and relative to an extraordinary extended family, by being friend to a bounty of remarkable people and by being student to exceptional teachers.

That core belief asserted, I have been equally blessed with having found and spent my adult life with my soulmate, a person whose being has shaped me in ways I find astonishing. She has been my beloved for 46 years, beginning in that moment when she saw something in me beyond the really-nice-guy part.

And so, on this day of my 45^th wedding anniversary, having lived and loved those years with my beloved wife, my precious Dolphy, I give thanks that she has neither stopped loving her really nice guy nor fatigued from helping him become the fellow he is today . . . that really nice guy and much more.

Yes, Sam Posner . . . (at the end of the movie script when the living starts) I, too, got the girl . . . and with and from her so much more.