December 21, 2023

by Dr. Plastic Picker

My own love is back in San Diego, likely already at work. He’s sitting at his reading station and what I think is mindlessly looking at black and white images of parts of bodies and contrasting shadows of light and dark. I know he makes up stories in his minds about the images, and I’m sometimes still confused about why he went into radiology. He did it because he was from a working class family, and was a smart and bright student. He needed to support his parents. He needed the titles and the prestige. I married him partly because of that. He was the boy who represented so many of the values and strengths that men in my family embody.

I’m sitting at the kitchen table across from my father. I had thought I was going to retell the story of how my parents met. It’s a beautiful story of a 15 year old girl who met a smart and handsome and overly confident 17 year old boy in Vietnam back in the 1970s. I had heard bits and pieces of the story, but yesterday sitting at my parents small square table I heard the entirety of the story with my nephew. He is my oldest brother’s youngest son. We laughed and were enraptured. It was an absolutely beautiful moment that the four of us will never forget. This story will be retold, and I won’t retell it here. It doesn’t feel right. It belongs to the family, and to the two granddaughters who will here the story. At 14 and 15, they were the same age of their grandmother when fate brought two young people together.

My dad told me yesterday that in Vietnamese you often introduce your wife as “Day la nha toi.” I don’t have the Vietnamese language software that can put in the diacritic marks. But essentially the phrase can be translated into “Here is my house” “Here is my home” “Here is my family.” It is a powerful phrase because essentially the wife is the house, the home and the family.

It might be old-fashioned but the proof is in all of us here today to celebrate 50 years of marriage. Here is celebrate the 7 grandchildren that are absolutely loved and cherished, that resulted from each of their children believing in love and fate and destiny. The two son-in-laws are not here, but they have absolutely been loved by my parent’s daughters. We are the girls who have created a house, home and family for our husbands.

And with that, I wanted to remember that phrase, that moment at the kitchen table and that absolute sense of rightness. These are the values I was taught, and it was so ingrained in me – but I had forgotten the source. It’s good to be together again to remind us our roots. And for the 11 of us here in Oahu today it’s because of a sweet love story when a 15 year old girl met a brash 17 year old boy, who dared to buy a meal at the market place from the pretty 15 year old girl.