Elder Advice – Thinking Inside the Box – Extra!
2020 has become synonymous with bad news, sighing and resigned head shaking. Which is why I am delighted to be the bearer of more than welcome good news, early in this Week 21.
Harrison and Sarah announced their engagement.
“Engagement” – an odd word for it - given “engagement” is also used to describe such events as the battle of Waterloo. And “Rules of Engagement” include formal declarations of war, prisoner exchanges, protection of civilians and non-combatants, and communication between warring factions, which bear no similarities, of any kind, to marriage … hmm.
Anyway, my admiration for Harrison has always been boundless, but especially now. He went the extra mile ... the extra 94.7 miles actually … to Lakefield, to do the right thing and ask for Sarah’s father’s blessing.
That sound you hear is my father’s buttons busting.
And as for Sarah, her application for membership in the family was approved long ago, Lisa and I have spent hours since thinking how, if they ever broke up, we were going to break it to Harrison that we had decided to keep her and let him go.
In the weeks and months to come, I expect to have no end of opportunities to provide all manner of useful and utterly unsolicited Elder Advice to Harrison and Sarah. But, as Vlad the Impaler always said, “it is never too early to start.”
Harrison/Sarah: Marriage is forever. Like cement. In the all-important legal sense however, it is a contract, not to be entered into lightly. It is final, binding, and ironclad. Unless, of course, it is based on fraud, or there is a misrepresentation, or a common mistake, or a unilateral mistake, or a public policy basis to void it. In which case, it is susceptible to a variety of remedies, both in common law and equity, including rescission.
But now I am just wallowing in romance.