CAUTIONARY TALE FOR PEOPLE WHO ASK TOO MANY QUESTIONS

Me: I’m getting ready for my first mother-in-law visit to Ruth and Derek in Ontario.
Her: Oh! You must be excited.
Me: Yes I am. They ar too.
Her: I’ll bet! It’s really exciting, isn’t it?
Me: Yes. Only one more sleep. By the way, you and your mother have a close long-distance relationship. How often ideally would you like her to visit?
Her: Twice a year.
Me: Mmm, only twice?
Her: Well, I like to visit her too you know.
Me: Mmmm, I guess.
Her: Maybe three times, yes, ideally maybe three.
Me: Mmmm, I guess I was looking for more than that.
Her: Maybe more if my place had more than one bedroom.

Could this be the conversation that scuttles my plan to buy WestJet so I could get free flights to Ontario?

AUDACIOUSLY SPREADING HOPE THROUGH STORY part 7

A single story can be hopeful or not-so-hopeful. It all depends on where you put the emphasis.

Part 1
Create hope in a story you tell by making sure you know in your heart where the hope is. Feel it first.

Part 2
Create hope by playing with time. Make the time span as long as it needs to be.

Part 3
Create hope in one context by telling a hopeful story about another.

Part 4
Create hope in stories by talking about hope.

Part 5
Create hope in stories by including symbols.

part 6
Create hope with heroes

7) Create hope by favouring the underdog.

Jan Scruggs: It is human nature for us to want the underdogs to win amazing victories against stronger opponents in sports or other endeavors in life. It gives us hope--if
this athlete or politician or business owner or performer can succeed in spite of overwhelming odds, maybe we, too, can overcome the challenges in our
own lives.

What more can I say than Jan Scruggs has already said? If you want to put hope in your story, feature an underdog who made good. Make sure you mention that this person is an underdog, draw attention to it through any means you have, dialogue, observation, direct reference. Make sure we know why your hero is at a disadvantage? Help us see how that changes. To add impact, tell us whether the hero had hope at any point in the story, and tell us when the hope grew. Add a symbol of the hope if you can.

AUDACIOUSLY SPREADING HOPE THROUGH STORY part 6

A single story can be hopeful or not-so-hopeful. It all depends on where you put the emphasis.

Part 1
Create hope in a story you tell by making sure you know in your heart where the hope is. Feel it first.

Part 2
Create hope by playing with time. Make the time span as long as it needs to be.

Part 3
Create hope in one context by telling a hopeful story about another.

Part 4
Create hope in stories by talking about hope.

part 5
Create hope in stories by including symbols.

6) Create hope with heroes.

Rhonda Leigh Jones: The success of the Harry Potter series can be attributed to its masterful use of the hero's quest, which readers like because it gives them hope.

A hero—artfully placed in a story--is a human symbol of hope. As Jones observes, the hero’s role is implicitly hopeful. A hero does remarkable things. A hero transforms, overcomes, exceeds, prevails through adversity. A story with a solid hero captures us. It inspires us. It compels us to believe in the power of humanity—to entertain the notion that any person might, given a chance, be a hero.
A hero’s hope-enhancing power is considerable, and it can be increased by explicitly linking that hero with hope. A simple Internet search linking hope and heroes will show you that writers are highlighting the connection in a variety of genres. One good example appears in an article about cyclist Lance Armstrong. The Hero Of Hope where Dan Wetzel writes: “”But battling the Alps, the time trials and the snippy French press was really nothing compared to being the hero of hope to all of those chemotherapy patients.
Lance Armstrong is the most important athlete of our generation for all of that.
"I want you all to know that I intend to beat this disease," said Armstrong on Oct. 8, 1996, back when such talk was not likely to be taken seriously.
Armstrong was the ninth-ranked cyclist in the world at the time, a fringe player in a fringe sport in America, all of which makes his impact today seem
so unlikely. He had testicular cancer, which had spread to his abdomen and lungs, which meant his boasts of beating it seemed based primarily on false
hope.
"Further," he said, "I intend to ride again as a professional cyclist."
What has transpired since is so incredible, so moving, so miraculous, so important that it doesn't seem possible.
Armstrong didn't just beat cancer, he showed thousands of others how to do it, raised millions to ensure more would, and changed the entire way the disease
is viewed.
Ten years ago, who didn't know someone lost to cancer? Today who doesn't know someone who has beaten it? Today when the diagnosis comes in, as gut-wrenching
and horrifically frightening as it is, it isn't what it once was. It isn't a death sentence. Today, there is a chance.
Armstrong, with his Texas tenacity, with his American drive, hammered the disease and then returned to cycling and crushed all comers, winning the Tour
just 18 months after a press conference many people figured would signal his death.””
We see in this excerpt that Wetzel is writing not only about Armstrong, but also about hope, the transition from false hope to hope itself, from the impossible to the possible. Wetzel has formed a story about a hero and made it a story about hope.

AUDACIOUSLY SPREADING HOPE THROUGH STORY part 5

A single story can be hopeful or not-so-hopeful. It all depends on where you put the emphasis.

Part 1
Create hope in a story you tell by making sure you know in your heart where the hope is. Feel it first.

Part 2
Create hope by playing with time. Make the time span as long as it needs to be.

Part 3
Create hope in one context by telling a hopeful story about another.

Part 4
Create hope in stories by talking about hope.

5) Create hope in stories by including symbols.

Sherry Turkle: objects carry both ideas and passions. In our
relations to things, thought and feeling are inseparable.

Is there anything that makes a story more memorable, more compelling, more hopeful than a clearly identified symbol of hope? People give meanings to symbols and objects. They recall them time and time again. Any object can be identified as a symbol of hope. A hope symbol evokes the feeling of hope. By association it becomes linked to hope. There are some common hope symbols—angels, candles, butterflies and the like, but any object can be identified as a symbol of hope. All you have to do is mention the object and refer explicitly to hope at the same time. If you want to explain it clearly you can. If the hope symbol appears more than once in the story all the better.

AUDACIOUSLY SPREADING HOPE THROUGH STORY Part 4

A single story can be hopeful or not-so-hopeful. It all depends on where you put the emphasis.

Part 1
Create hope in a story you tell by making sure you know in your heart where the hope is. Feel it first.

Part 2
Create hope by playing with time. Make the time span as long as it needs to be.

Part 3
Create hope in one context by telling a hopeful story about another.

4) Create hope in stories by talking about hope.

Jaklin Eliott and Ian Olver: The multiple employment of hope suggests that the term cannot be defined simply as an entity to be operationalized and measured but can accommodate a plethora of meanings.

It may seem incredibly, ridiculously simple, but one of the easiest ways to give emphasis to hope in any story is to mention hope directly. Fortunately for us, hope gives us words in abundance. It is both a noun and a verb. We have hope, we hope for things. It is also a word with a number of derivatives—hoped, hoping, hopeless, hopeful, etc. C.R. Snyder, a prominent hope specialist in the world of academic hope studies, writes about high hopers and low hopers. Here in Edmonton at the Hope Foundation of Alberta, a centre for hope studies, I tend to speak of our circle of interested researchers as old hopeys.
Each of hope’s derivatives is just as helpful in the task of emphasis-giving as the root word itself. We can talk about hope in terms of quantity, no hope, lots of hope. We can mention hope in conjunction with acts, with events, with symbols--the thing that gave us hope.
Here in our counselling program, I have found that you can get anybody to talk to you about hope when you ask a question that mentions it. When I ask people to tell me their hopes, they willingly give answers that begin with I hope. When I ask them to tell me about a person who gives them hope, they tell me about a person who gives them hope and they describe that person in relation to hope. This practice also serves me well in the creation of stories.
It is not difficult to give emphasis to hope in a story if you ask yourself hope-related questions about the characters and then take the time to answer them. Let us think of a few familiar fairy tales. What was Jack hoping for when he planted the beans that grew into a beanstock? What were the three pigs hoping for when they built their houses? When did Hansel and Gretel feel the ultimate hopelessness? At what points did they hope for things? When youname hope’s role in a story, when you mention it in any form, talk about it, play with it, it will help you adjust the emphasis.

ABOUT OUR RELATIONSHIP ...

Kitty on the first day: I see they’re packing up the camping gear. I hope that doesn’t mean I’ll be staying with you!

Kitty on the second day: Well, perhaps, since they didn’t make it home last night, I’ll let you put food in my dish.

Kitty on the third day: I’ve been thinking that maybe you’d like to see more of me.

Kitty on the fourth day: Just behind the left ear, please. Ahhh! A little toward the neck. Now you’re getting the idea! I really think that having me around is doing you quite a lot of good.

Me to Kitty: Doesn’t it give you hope to know that in less than a week your worst nightmare can become your best friend?

AUDACIOUSLY SPREADING HOPE THROUGH STORY: part 3

A single story can be hopeful or not-so-hopeful. It all depends on where you put the emphasis.

Part 1
Create hope in a story you tell by making sure you know in your heart where the hope is. Feel it first.

Part 2
Create hope by playing with time. Make the time span as long as it needs to be.

3) Create hope in one context by telling a hopeful story about another.

W. F. Lynch: Hope is “the fundamental knowledge and feeling that there is a way out of difficulty, that things can work out ...”
In Part 2 of this series we referred to the victory speech delivered by Barack Obama on November 4, 2008, showing how he sought to inspire hope by telling his listeners a story of American history and triumph spanning a period of more than 150 years. By using a long time span, he was able to show resolution of certain issues, thus raising hope that current issues could be resolved. Now we turn to the issue of context, closely related to the idea of time and ask: Can a hopeful story about one thing give us hope for another?
Hopeful stories capture our imagination and attention. Have you ever stopped to wonder why romantic comedies have remained popular since Shakespeare’s time? It’s certainly not because we don’t know the ending. In fact, if we know a story is described as romantic comedy, we can predict with reasonable accuracy very near the beginning which of the characters will be coupled at the end. We attend to these stories because we like them. We like them because they give us hope.
Our work in counselling psychology at the Hope Foundation of Alberta, a centre for hope studies, is rooted in the belief that hope generated in one story can inspire hope in a context that has little to do with the hopeful story that is being told. To put it another way, we get hope from stories that have hope in them and we carry the hope over to other stories. The hope we carry over generates a set of possibilities for how the new story might end. In the work of counselling, this theory is important when working with people who have little hope. It means that we can use stories to generate hope for them, a hope that might possibly change their actions.
This work has taught me that it is important for me to have a large repertoire of hopeful stories—stories that give me hope. My repertoire of stories has become quite diverse, featuring big stories, small stories, stories about me, stories about others, folk tales and new stories. All of them have a place in my heart.
Some of these stories can be told at a crucial moment to people whose hope is seriously undermined by depression or seemingly unsolvable problems. The context does not necessarily have to be a good match for the person’s problems and circumstances. It’s the emphasis that counts, a hopeful emphasis. People change. Things exceed our expectations. Things surprise us. Though we may not see it in our own picture, stories can inspire us to imagine that there just might be a way out of difficulty. Things might possibly work out. We know that romantic comedies aren’t about us. They aren’t meant to teach us a lesson. Yet they still give us hope, and that matters.

NEXT YEAR IN THE SUMMER

I’ll spend more time in the yard next summer
Tending the flowers
Lounging on the veranda
Unless, by chance...

May is busy or June is cold
Or thunderstorms blow in when I am available,
Or too many loved-ones decide to get married,
Or I am chosen to present in Los Angeles
Or the State of Delaware offers a contract
Or all of these things happen
Or something completely different happens,
In which case...

I’ll plan to spend more time in the yard the following year.

THE CHOCOLATE PARADIGM

Lawrence: (Holding a new box of chocolates hand-made in California) There’s a chocolate in this box I hate.
Dad: Oh. Which one is it?
Lawrence: (eating a chocolate) I don’t know. I haven’t found it yet.
Mom: Even in the presence of doubt, and possibly failure we continue to try, hoping for the best.

AUDACIOUSLY SPREADING HOPE THROUGH STORY part 2

A single story can be hopeful or not-so-hopeful. It all depends on where you put the emphasis.

1) Create hope in a story you tell by making sure you know in your heart where the hope is. Feel it first.

2) Create hope by playing with time. Make the time span as long as it needs to be.

Ronna Jevne: “Hope is grounded in the past, focussed on the future and experienced in the present. It enables people to envision a future in which they are willing to participate.”

How can we structure a story about the past that will cause us to feel hope for the future? As we saw in Part 1

Part 1 of this series, stories don’t always make us or others hopeful the first time we tell them. We have to tinker a bit. One way of creating hope in a story is to play with time. We can make the time span as long as it needs to be. It is, after all, the teller who ultimately chooses the earliest and latest points of reference for any story.
On the night of November 4, 2008, newley elected US president Barack Obama gave a victory speech that was, by its design, deliberately hopeful. Its theme was “Yes We Can” and its message was: “We know we can because we have done it in the past.” In order to allow maximum space for hope, Obama chose a main character for his story who had just voted at the age of 106. He could then tell a story of America’s achievements during her long life. And then, because she was of African-American descent, and because he wanted to show that Americans had overcome slavery, he overcame an obvious limitation by stating that she was born just one generation after slavery. That was the only mention of slavery. But by including that single reference, he had made a long story short, and he had made it hopeful.
A few years ago I set out to create a story about women with breast cancer. I wanted to show how they had overcome a code of secrecy and learned to speak for themselves. Early versions of the story began in the 1970’s when women first began to speak publicly on the topic. The version I tell now begins in the present then cycles rapidly backward with short vignettes all the way back to the time of Hipocrates. The story of how women have changed in the past 30 years has more impact when it also shows that women did not speak for thousands of years, even though men spoke on the topic with various theories. One of the underlying themes is that things stayed the same for a very long time, and then, when they began to change, they changed a lot in a short time.

AUDACIOUSLY SPREADING HOPE THROUGH STORY: PART 1

Any given story can be hopeful or not-so-hopeful. It all depends on where you put the emphasis. For the past fifteen years I have experimented with stories, reflected on hope, read books, listened to stories, told stories, and tried to figure out what makes a story into a hopeful story. In this series, I will share some of the things I have learned along the way. I welcome comments and observations from readers.

1) Create hope in a story you tell by making sure you know in your heart where the hope is. Feel it first.

Like so many important lessons of life, I learned this one the hard way. Of course I have always known that hope, among other things, is an emotion. It’s something we feel. When we say, “There is no hope,” it isn’t because we’ve searched the world in every corner and found no evidence of hope. What we really mean is, “I do not feel any hope.”
Hope is a positive complex emotion, a little like joy, a little like excitement, a good feeling with doubt and uncertainty nipping at its edges. It comes to us from events, from points of view, from successes, from people in our lives. Stories are a major source of hope.
I have often heard and read stories that gave me hope. As a young teen-ager I lay on my bed on bright June evenings sniffling my way through Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. What a sad book it was, a story of racism and bullying and systemic indifference to injustice. And yet, at the end of that story, I felt hopeful. I believed that things could change! This month, noting the 50th anniversary celebrations of the publication of that book, I see that millions of others were similarly affected. Writing at a time when the injustices she exposed were still in full flower, Harper Lee knew how to put the hope into a story. I, unfortunately, am not Harper Lee.
Back in 2005 my dying mother was blundering her way through the corridors of palliative care. I was spending a lot of time with her there, experiencing the little pleasures, the big heartbreaks, the nagging frustrations. At the same time I was working in my daily routine, and presentation requests from palliative care organizations were coming to the Hope Foundation. In any year I would have responded knowledgeably to such requests, but in 2005 I felt truly engaged. I knew the situation from the patient’s daughter’s perspective and my rock solid hope content was filtered through my personal experience. I presented with passion, but not, unfortunately, with hope.
At the end of one such session I was approached by a sad and sincere doctor. “What could we do to make things better for your mother?” he asked. To my horror I found that I had no answer. And that’s when I discovered that I did not see the hope in my own stories. I had been talking about the impersonal approach of the health system. My talk, loaded with hope content and ostensibly about hope, was of limited use to these people working in the health system because it did not give them hope. When people hire a hope specialist to give them a talk, they are looking for hope. I had failed to deliver.
I was about to be re-tested. Another talk was scheduled for a different group two months hence. I would have like to withdraw, but the conference program had long ago been distributed. By the time the date arrived, my mother had died. I vowed not to make the same mistake again.
A hopeful story is, as I had often said in classes, not necessarily a story with a happy ending. It is, rather, a story where somebody changes, or something exceeds expectations, or something surprising happens. I was shocked to find that the stories I had been telling in presentations contained very little of this. Returning to the events leading up to and following my mother's death, I went back to my hope knowledge and began asking myself some questions. Who changed? What occurrences exceeded my expectations? What surprised me?
There were an astonishing number of answers. My mother changed. My father changed. I changed. The hospital staff exceeded my expectations. Many things surprised me. A treasure trove of hopeful stories were buried here. Among others, there was the story of how my father learned to grow vegetables and how my mother talked herself into welcoming the move to the palliative care suite. There was the story of how a hospital cutback that closed the nursery created the most wonderful palliative care apartment. There was the story of the nurse who brought lip balm and the one who told Mom comforting stories about the death of other patients. There was the story of the nurse who held my mother in the middle of the night and whispered to us that maybe it was time. And then there was the story of the hope-opotamus, the tiny stuffed animal with the power to command staff in three different hospitals and make them want to follow his lead. When I pulled together these stories, I knew where the hope was, and I knew then how to shape the stories of that painful time so that they would be hopeful to me, and also hopeful to others.

WEDDING HANGOVER

Ruth and Derek packed for Ontario
Taking the things that newlyweds need,
Furniture, wedding gifts, kitchen gadgets,
Love and best wishes from multiple corners.

Ruth and Derek packed for Ontario
Leaving for us what they could not take.
Random papers and lockless keys,
Contact info no longer connectible
Bottles and cans redeemable for cash,
Bamboo plant and one small suitcase,
Half-tubs of cookie dough, frozen berries,
Condiments and breast of chicken,
Livestock marker and picture frame
Candle lighters and flammable fluid,
Drying flowers and table adornments,
Toilet brush and Liquid Plumber,
Laundry soap and fabric softener,
Furniture polish and window cleaner,
Dishwashing liquid, dishwasher detergent

Ruth and Derek live in Ontario
Building a life to last a lifetime.
And if in their absence we find ourselves lonely
Perhaps there is no need to fuss or to worry.
We can bring them close in the simplest of acts,
With email or telephone, story or photograph,
Dinner and candles and washing up after,
Laundry and cleaning in every room.
Far away by kilometre measure,
And yet, surprisingly near.

CAN WE DO IT?

A young environmental advocate attended my hopeful storytelling workshop at the NSN conference in Los Angeles. For her it was a question of how to keep hope alive for people trying to combat climate change in a world where so many people don’t want to hear the warnings. We had come to L.A. from Philadelphia where we had visited Elfreth’s Alley
Elfreth’s Alley is a street of houses that have been continuously occupied for nearly 300 years! And It makes me wonder if we might be under-estimating our human potential. Three hundred years ago we already knew how to build structures that would be fit for habitation in the 21st century. Given all that we have learned since then, can it really be beyond our grasp to create a sustainable world?

PRESENTING ISSUES PAST AND FUTURE

And on this day …
You see bright sunshine, thunder clouds on the far horizon, picnic invitations. I see a calendar of hope presentations and workshops stretching all the way to Christmas.
The interests of the audience will vary. There’ll be chronic pain patients and mental health teams; housing facilitators and FASD mentors; school liaison workers and lab managers; parents and storytellers; nurse/educators and relatives of people with early stage Alzheimer Disease. All will be interested in hope. Each will have a pre-set number of hours, a seating plan, a few notes of quotes scribbled while listening to the person who asked for the presentation. For each there will be some careful consideration. What do I know about hope that would matter to these people? This is the beauty of a career that focuses more on a concept than on a problem. You get variety, diversity, stimulation, an opportunity to grow. Looking back at it all makes my head spin.
The length will vary as it has in the past. . The longest one (not counting the university course on hope and the helping relationship) lasted 4.5 days. You can get a little tired of the sound of your own voice in 4.5 days. The shortest lasted 11 minutes. Originally scheduled for 30 minutes, that one was contracted and paid for by someone who said she hired me because politicians were speaking before me, she couldn’t regulate the politicians, and she knew she could count on me to finish exactly ten minutes before the moment when the concurrent speakers after me were scheduled to begin—thus saving the conference pattern from the chaos that would begin if the first session ran overtime.
Positioning will undoubtedly present itself in unpredictable ways. On one occasion I was surprised to find myself presenting to a group of people who were lying down. They were injured, and lying down was comfortable for them. I, on the other hand, was distinctly uncomfortable, not knowing just how to stand, possessed by a desire to flatten myself on the ceiling facing them from above. On another occasion I chatted with a group of moms sitting on a circle of chairs. In the middle of the circle was a quilt where half a dozen babies wriggled, babbled, crawled, reached out tiny hands and gazed longingly at those in their midst who had been granted a bottle. Try keeping to the topic under those conditions!
Audiences will find their own way to respond. In the past there were keynote beginnings enhanced by microphones lobbed into crowds sitting row upon row in lecture theatres. There were intimate round-table discussions and times when people from the session next door knocked on our door to ask if we could laugh a little more quietly so that their presenter could be heard better. And then there was that one terrible unforgettable Friday afternoon when the organizer decided to stay home while all the people for whom she had organized the event sat fidgeting, and wishing they had been given that option.
Looking back on it all I have to say that some of it was really good. Most of it was pretty good. A little of it was inescapably dreadful. After 15 years you’d think I must have seen everything. But somehow, I doubt it.

WEDDING Q&A

Are they Married yet?
Definitely! The act of commitment was ably and lovingly guided by Pastor Bob who made certain that each of the partners would speak their vows clearly into the microphone, thereby making it possible for everyone to hear what they said. Pastor Bob knows what really matters at a wedding.

Did the mother of the bride cry?
Yes, but only at the rehearsal.

How was the cake?
Fabulous!

At what hour did the mother of the bride trade her pretty shoes for comfortable shoes?
6:46 PM (approximately 7 hours before she arrived home). The shoes are now in the charity box. They’ll soon be gone forever.

Who helped make the occasion a success?
So many people helped hugely with the rehearsal dinner, the ceremony, the reception, the dance, the pictures, the flowers and the next-day barbecue in the park that it would be impossible to name them! And then there are the ones who helped in medium and small ways!

Where are the bride and groom now?
In Kelowna, at least that’s where they said they were going.

How are the parents of the bride spending this day?
Saying farewell to relatives, doing laundrey, eating leftovers and counting their blessings. Later today they might book air tickets to Guelph. It will be fun to look ahead to their first few nights of sleep in the couple’s guest room. But before that time arrives there’s work to do, holidays to take, gardens to tend, and a little bit of sleep to catch up on.

What is the mother of the bride going to write about now that the wedding is over?

GOOD QUESTION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What did the mother of the bride actually say to the crowd at the reception?

Hard to say exactly, but this is what she wrote to say.
One night last February, Derek called David and me to tell us he would be celebrating Lupercalia by proposing to Ruth. Lupercalia was a very ancient Roman pastoral fertility festival observed on February 15. The Romans drove out evil spirits by sacrificing two goats and adog. Now this might not be your idea of a romantic day for a marriage proposal, especially from an animal welfare guy. Derek was planning for Valentine’s Day, until Ruth said that the meaning of Valentine’s Day had been completely overshadowed by commercialism guided by a conspiracy of profit. He wanted us to be happy about the proposal, and I guess he didn’t feel he’d said enough over the phone, because the next day we received this follow-up email.
“Something that I forgot to say last night when I had no idea what to say last night, was something that should never EVER go without saying, least of all last night. That is, WHY I want to talk to Ruth about spending the rest of our whole entire lives together. As you both know, she is sensitive and thoughtful, caring and intelligent. she is special. But she also just makes me want to be a better person and I already am a better person with her in my life. I respect her. I admire her. I look-up to her. She makes me want to have a family. I want her to be my wife and to be my partner for life. I want to go through the rest of my days knowing her and being close to her. And these are just some of the things that come to mind but words are sometimes hard to find ..” Signed, Derek
What more could we wish for Ruth than to find a partner who would send such a note to her family. Derek, you sure have made it easy for us to love you.

WEDDING PREP 10

Things are better than they used to be.
We decorated. Where once we would have spent hours folding Kleenex flowers to decorate cars that would later drive to the wedding in the rain, we tied bright sashes on the backs of chairs garbed in pristine chair smocks. (Those chairs have absolutely no chance of being pushed out into the rain.)
Instead of crowding 35 people into the house for the rehearsal dinner to avoid the rain that had been falling all week, we were able to let them flow out onto the deck, the veranda, the lawn to enjoy the evening sunshine.
And in a few short hours there will be no more wedding prep. Only weddeing.

WEDDING PREP 9

And the groom is with us, smiling, yet practical. You can, he advises the mother of the bride, go to the website of the New Yorker and find cartoons filed and easy to research. He searches for cartoons about animals and scientists and uses them to illustrate his presentations.
The couple is a radiant team, fresh from their final pre-wedding consult with the pastor. There was still a lot to decide on last report—the wording of the vows, exactly what to promise.
“And what will you be saying to each other?” asks the mother of the bride.
And the groom replies, “You’ll do.”
Has he been searching for topics other than animals?

WEDDING PREP 8

And the groom arrived last night, a fitting development for a wedding. We were all glad to see him. It makes all this planning seem more purposeful. He hasn’t been here since late May and he says this time it feels different. After ten months of back-and-forth airplane romance they’ll be taking flights together from now on. In less than two weeks they’ll have flown off to begin their life in Ontario.
Mother of the bride is happy for them, feeling sorry for herself. The father of the bride cut to the chase this morning. “You know,” he said, “We don’t miss our parents that much when we’re away from them.” He’s right too, and we really love our parents.
His mother left her mother many years ago. She set sail for Canada in 1946 to join the soldier she’d married more than a year earlier. Just think of it! There was no intention to phone her mother, no possibility for email. Tragedies were communicated by telegram. News of daily events was relayed by mail. She did not return to Britain for 18 years. Her children were teen-agers by then.
The mother of this bride has a telephone, and email, and a daughter who has shown herself to be an excellent communicator. There will be visits. She plans to visit that new house in Ontario in early September. She plans to phone. She plans to write. She doesn't see that bride every day now, doesn't even talk to her every day. Things will be fine. But who among us would pass up the chance for a pity party now and then? The sad with the happy. A mixture. That's what it is.

WEDDING PREP 7

And when the father of the bride rolled out of bed saying, “I’ve had enough sleep for now,” the mother of the bride said, “then turn off the alarm.” The clock said “4:15 AM.” She intended to go back to sleep, and she really might have, had the man not closed the bedroom door before he left, thus compelling her to find out what he was up to—actually down to—in the kitchen below.
He was making the wedding cake. Would you like the recipe?

Preparation
Open up your Internet browser, go to Kijiji and check to see if the four-tiered wedding cake pans we listed there have sold yet. Buy them if they haven’t. We promise to use the money wisely.
Go to the store and get 2 pounds of butter, 1/4 cup vanilla, 8 large bags of marshmallows and 112 cups of Rice Krispies. Also get a roll of parchment and some scissors. You’ll need the paper to line the pans, and you might want to use some spray for the corners in case the cake sticks there.
Now get a very large cauldron with a source of heat. A backyard hot tub would probably do nicely. This family didn’t have one, and their one large mixing bowl gets a little too hot when you make several batches in rapid succession, which is your only option for this recipe if you don't have a backyard hottub. So they borrowed another mixing bowl from the brother of the bride and used it even though it's a fancy bowl that says "POPCORN" ON THE SIDE. It’s good to get the whole family involved.
(Optional): one small dog willing to cruise the floor and lick up spills.
Melt the butter and then add the marshmallows and stir like crazy.
Add the vanilla and Rice Krispies and stir like crazy.
Put the stuff into a pan, get a spoon, and crunch the whole mass down like crazy.
Now you’re done. If you started some time around 4:30 it will be somewhere around 6:30, MAYBE 7:00. If you have a good wife she’ll clean up the kitchen for you. If not, she’ll be upstairs blogging about it.
Warning: don’t follow the recipe on the Rice Krispies box! The father of the bride never follows recipes exactly, sometimes not even approximately, and he’s one of the world’s best Rice Krispies Squares bakers the world has ever known. .

WEDDING PREP 6

And here sits the mother of the bride, wondering what she should say in her one-minute speech at the reception. One minute? Has the mother of this bride ever restricted her comment on anything to one minute?
The bride says, “Say whatever you want. Take as long as you like.” Oh the power of permission-giving! She’s a shrewd one, this bride.
Given that the mother of the bride has no idea what to say, one minute ought to do it. She wants to say, “We like you Derek. Welcome to the family.”
But that will shock everyone. They won’t even have started listening by the time she’s finished, and on the way home the guests will say, “Too bad the mother of the bride couldn’t think of anything to say.” What should she add?
She could start with a little joke. Jokes are always a good option. Always? Well, maybe not always. She might never forget the joke told at one wedding by the master of ceremonies, a well-respected relative. He said, “Marriage is like a bathtub. After a while it’s not so hot.” It’s not the kind of joke one would want to remember forever. Jokes can be a little bit dangerous. Stil, a tasteful joke might be nice.
“Last June, when Edmontonions were being bitten by mosquitoes, our daughter was bitten by the love bug. At first the symptoms were barely noticeable, mild fever, slight agitation. But in only a couple of weeks we saw signs of a full-blown infection.”
But that won’t do. It’s the start of a longer story, and the mother of the bride gets carried away if you let her loose on a story. She doesn’t think she can tell a story and welcome Derek to the family in a single minute.
She could give a bit of advice, like Robert Fulghum would. Think of all the money he must have made publishing Everything I Ever Needed To Know I Learned In Kindergarten! And what would she say? She has had a long and happy marriage. What has she learned?
“Be nice to each other. Let your mate overhear you praising him/her to others. Listen hard and seriously to what the other person is saying. Have fun every single day.”
Would she say, “Don’t go to bed mad?”
Are you kidding? The mother of the bride may have had a long and happy marriage, but she also believes firmly in the importantce of a good night’s sleep!