Wild Mountain Thyme

Marriage isn't a love affair. It isn't even a honeymoon. It's a job. A long hard job, at which both partners have to work, harder than they've worked at anything in their lives before. If it's a good marriage, it changes, it evolves, but it does on getting better. I've seen it with my own mother and father. But a bad marriage can dissolve in a welter of resentment and acrimony. I've seen that, too, in my own miserable and disastrous attempt at making another person happy. And it's never one person's fault. It's the sum total of a thousand little irritations, disagreements, idiotic details that in a sound alliance would simply be disregarded, or forgotten in the healing act of making love. Divorce isn't a cure, it's a surgical operation, even if there are no children to consider.

I wasn't good enough. I had a little talent but not enough. There is nothing more discouraging than having just a little talent.

I'm getting too elderly to travel the length of the country for a free hangover.

For he was drinking too much. Not uncontrollably nor offensively, but still he seldom seemed to have a glass out of his hand.

He's threatening to breed polo ponies, but he's always been a man of great ideas, but little action, so I don't suppose he will.

Marriage isn’t a love affair. It isn’t even a honeymoon. It’s a job. A long hard job, at which both partners have to work, harder than they’ve worked at anything in their lives before. If it’s a good marriage, it changes, it evolves, but it goes on getting better. I’ve seen it with my own mother and father. But a bad marriage can dissolve in a welter of resentment and acrimony. I’ve seen that, too, in my own miserable and disastrous attempt at making another person happy. And it’s never one person’s fault. It’s the sum total of a thousand little irritations, disagreements, idiotic details that in a sound alliance would simply be disregarded, or forgotten in the healing act of making love. Divorce isn’t a cure, it’s a surgical operation, even if there are no children to consider.

All his life, unless prevented by illness, war, or some other act of God, he had come to church on Sunday mornings. As a child because he had had to; as a soldier because he needed to; as a grown man because he was the Laird of Benchoile and it was important to be involved, to uphold the established traditions, to set a good example. And now, in his age, he came for comfort and reassurance. The old church, the words of the service, the tunes of the hymns, were some of the very few things in his life that hadn't changed. Perhaps, at the end of the day, the only thing.