A Personal Note on a Red-Letter Day

Today was full of the usual hurly-burly in the news, and it was a tragic day for some. But my family stepped away from public affairs for a while to celebrate the fact that our oldest daughter, Laura, age 23, got engaged this evening. A week ago her long-time boyfriend called and asked whether I could have lunch with him today. No problem. Foreseeing what was coming, I took him to the main dining room at the Minneapolis Club. Sure enough: he told me that he intended to ask my daughter to marry him this evening, and requested my permission to do so.

He is a good young man, wildly popular with Laura’s siblings, and that permission was readily forthcoming. That is an old-fashioned concept, perhaps, but we are old-fashioned people. As it happens, he and Laura are both solid conservatives, and his parents are long-time PL readers, so it won’t be a mixed marriage. But that is, I suppose, a relatively minor point.

The actual proposal was a rather elaborate procedure in which Laura’s two sisters and a few others participated. Here is the happy couple, just afterward:

There are, always, two worlds: the public world in which the events recorded as history take place, and the private world in which most people live. Generally, all that most of us ask of the public world is that it leave our private worlds alone. The political conflicts of our age result almost entirely from the public world’s refusal to accept such a bargain. To paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.

But all of that has been put aside for the moment, as we celebrate a wonderful occasion with two happy young people. Life, happily, goes on.

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