After more than thirty years married and forty years together, that graceful love of light and passion does not falter, but rather raises your expectations. It means protecting yourself more, accompanying yourself more and enjoying another wonder of life, which is our children’s children. Watching them (the grandchildren) grow is to relive every look, every smile, every first step our children took, which becomes an emotion as great as the first kiss, the first tear, the first time they said mom or dad.
Renewing vows is a moment of reflection. It is reliving an amazing and mysterious journey at the same time, because without being able to anticipate everything, life continues to surprise you, splendorously. Renewing vows is reaffirming the commitment to be together in good times and bad, reaffirming the pact of solidarity, it is remembering the most special moments, lived and to be lived! Because it is also possible to travel and remember the future when the past has been good, full of excitement and hope. I invite you to a short walk through what has been and will be, living Venezuela, being happy, and knowing it (dixit Pérez Reverte)
An expression of gratitude and infinite complicity
We can summarize an entire shared life in five words: love, commitment, celebration, gratitude and complicity.
To celebrate is to remember, and to remember is to live. Please accompany me on this “short” journey that spans more than three decades, hand in hand with God, with our faith, with family, with the friends that you are. I bet many have traveled the same path.
We embrace memories like jewels in the mist…Every laugh, every caress, every farewell or reunion is a sweet foam that touches us and disappears. That’s why you have to appreciate every second. Remember and remember. It is a ritual of fruitful experiences. It is to once again take the protective hand of our parents, the affectionate shelter of a beloved teacher, the childhood shared with our best friend, the beautiful fatigue of carrying our children on our shoulders.
My journey – I tell you gently – began in the canteen of my school, the Instituto Escuela. Being two teenagers, I was struck by the movement, the smile and the tender gaze of a girl who spoke little, but saw a lot. Almost without asking, I felt in my heart that she answered yes to every whim, to every desire. My dear Javier, the male brother who was not born from a common womb, but who God gave me as a gift, was the cupid. At that moment a destiny began to come together, a loving learning, that still does not stop. The full connection of two lives that come together both in passion and in understanding because your decisions will never be correct if they are not accompanied by the absolution and indulgence of the being you love and who loves you the most. It is losing the route when you do not have that fraternal act of remission. Fortunately, the complicity with the one who redeems and cares for you makes you leave the labyrinth and find him again at the exit, among honey, torches and jasmine.
Gabi has always been a fabulous mix of silences and vultures. Light in the storm. Spring in the desert. It’s fascinating how every day is able to surprise us with a yes when you expected a no and vice versa. It is the magic of the Venezuelan woman, overwhelmingly intuitive. She knows how to be where she wants to be or leave (silently) if she doesn’t like her, even when she is there. In this dimension, men cannot compete. We are crude, clumsy. From this premise, a man is successful because, according to my daughter Valeria, he learns to pay attention to the woman he loves, without selfishness and without boasting.
She had studied all her life at school and so had I. But we never met (…) That bright morning in March 1982, I didn’t want to go down to recess. After the break came chemistry class, whose teacher (Clavel) I was terrified of. He randomly chose her victim, to put (her) on the board and ask (her) for complex syntheses. He had a feeling that he would be the one… But Javier-like he always-convinced me. -Come on (Nano), I’m going to introduce you to Gabi the big one. There was another little one (Gaby) that he liked. Javier managed to secure the match.
After that first sweet and trusting look (like the one inherited by my daughters and now my granddaughter) a month later I ended up declaring my innocence, decoding (and containing) the beating of my chest. In decisive moments I confess that I am extremely nervous, so (she) without waiting to ask him, suddenly said YES…Then came a thunderous silence. This is how I learned to interpret the stillness of her gaze. She taught me to calm my agitation with her calm understanding. It’s learning to see the light you don’t want to see. And it springs, if it will happen…
Since that April afternoon, we have not been separated again. We graduated from high school, then she graduated as an architect from the Simón Bolívar University and I graduated as a lawyer from UCAB. By the way, every day she left college, she visited her. She made models of it while I reviewed my notes of Calamandrei or Jiménez de Azúa; Brewer Carías or Eloy Lares Martínez, without missing the magnacumlaudes notes of Juan Cristóbal and Donato. Without them no one graduated. Shortly after graduating as a lawyer, we got married. And soon the four blessings that God gave us were born: Constanza, Valeria and the twins Juan Ignacio and Eduardo Andrés. Today they represent our most beautiful dream come true. Now they are Valentina and José Antonio, our first grandchildren. Two hearts, two branches of love under the blue sky, that come to renew this sacred pact of love, commitment, celebration, gratitude and complicity.
It’s just chemistry, chemistry…
I came back from recess amazed, absolutely captivated. Love at first sight? Impossible. It wasn’t worth it. I didn’t do anything at all to deserve it. After many years together I have discovered that things always happen the way she wants. Her genius was to make me happy and let me know (…) Minutes later, what had to happen happened…
Clavel raised his voice: -Look at the blackboard. I was still levitating like an angel shepherding from cloud to cloud, shocked by that “recess.” -Build the synthesis of this Viera compound. -Yes, professor, I answered him like a defiant gladiator, that he wants to demonstrate his skills in front of the beast and the stands to earn the admiration of those he did not yet know well, nor was he there.
I made the longest synthesis of my life. I think that day I decided to study law! I couldn’t fit one more equation on the board. But I did it. Clavel approached and looked me straight in the eyes. My heart was overflowing again (as it had happened minutes before at recess). -Well, Viera. You seem to be inspired. He could do the same thing in three lines, but he achieved it in more than twenty. Well nothing, that’s life. Some take long paths and others take shorter ones…What could he have wanted to tell me? It did not matter. My mind was still somewhere else.
However, that has been my destiny. I have always gotten where I am going, by the longest and steepest routes! And I have been able to do it thanks to his inspiration. Our women are then, without a doubt, our best equation, our “synthesis” of each day, our path and our arrival, where the blackboard of life is written by the lime of our love. How can we not renew that desire to write about them? As our Frank Quintero’s song says, it’s just chemistry, chemistry (…) that consolidates the universe, tenderness and emotion in a new oath between laughter, auspices and carnations…
A new chapter of excitement
It was a special day. We renew the promises we made years ago, and add new ones. We ask for Venezuela, to return to the house where we made a family and founded a home. Every day at your side has been a gift that I value and keep warmly in my saddlebag. Like the first yes, without asking…because in the same way-without asking-our mothers, with great love, brought us into the world.
Renewing my vows, I promise to continue loving you, supporting you and growing with you on this journey called life. I promise to continue loving, supporting and doing everything in my power so that this long journey ends where it began: in grace, in the hectic nest and in the beauty of our beloved country. Thank you for everything you are and for everything we have built together. And as Valeria said: thank you for understanding us and taking us by the hand, despite knowing that the route was not the shortest. The time has come to understand you, to pay attention to yourself, and say yes to destiny without having to ask for it.
Venezuela is at the exit of the labyrinth, waiting for us to return to the paths of honey, lanterns and Jasmine, to see the light that we do not want to see. We pray for all those who have been happy and did not know it and for those who want to know it. Our offerings today are more for others than for ourselves. We have shared so many joys, also bitter sadness, overcoming challenges, that now it is time to ask for the well-being, light and prosperity of that great and noble woman called Venezuela. Let’s pay attention to it!
(…) Javier, dear brother, you have left soon. Continue to rest in peace. Some mischief in heaven is not enough to embark on a new journey of absolution, redemption, peace and renewal of vows.
Happy mothers day!
@ovierablanco
