There's life after politics, and how. And it can be not just a lot sweeter but a lot more real. Doubt it? Just glance at the picture of the happy couple on Page 2B of Friday's Arkansas section taken by our own Rachel Chaney, who would have made a fine wedding photographer. Both still-Senator-for-a-while Mark Pryor and his fiancee, Ms. Joi Whitfield, glow with that insanity that is the ultimate sanity: love.
It's hard to look at that picture and not break into smiles and applause. For happiness, like love, is a highly contagious condition--a disease from which no one wishes to recover. Which is why everybody who reads Arkansas' Newspaper--that is, everybody in Arkansas--must have had a happier Friday morning after turning to the Arkansas section. Dr. Johnson may have famously defined a second marriage as "a triumph of hope over experience," but we say three cheers, yea, four, for hope. Experience, for all its advantages, can't compete with hope, for whoever heard of experience making anyone as happy as this couple obviously is?
The senator did make a passing reference to his enviable condition during his farewell address to the Senate last week. Among his many blessings, Mark Pryor noted, with thanks and praise to the author of all true happiness, "God has also brought an old sweetheart back into my life--Joi--with whom I attended the sixth and seventh grades. So when I say God has brought me joy, I mean it. Literally."
Congratulations to the bridegroom not only on his great good fortune in finding joy/Joi, but in using the adverb Literally correctly, a sight not often seen in these increasingly illiterate times, certainly not among politicians, who can be as merciless on the English language as they are on their constituents.
This is not only a love story but an Arkansas story. Both the now young-again people in that photograph went to Pulaski Heights Middle School in their childhoods, but as childhoods will go, it went. And they went on their separate ways after that. But about a year and a half ago, they ran into each other at a groundbreaking in North Little Rock. Coincidence? There are no coincidences, as all believers know. Theirs sounds like a match made in Heaven, or rather the closest thing to it on this earth, Arkansas.
Ah, love! Ah, Arkansas! Unlike the harum-scarum world of politics, which always seems so urgent and turns out to be so unimportant in so many ways, love abides. Just as First Corinthians says, love is patient. But when it does arrive, boy.
Mark Pryor is seeing the light in so many ways these days. For example, like Tim Griffin, he's planning to get the heck out of Washington and settle down in good old Arkansas, which will be delighted to welcome him back home.
Why hang around Washington as just another ex-senator turned lobbyist à la Blanche Lincoln? She clearly belongs up there, and did even when she was a senator from Arkansas. Mark Pryor, his father's son, always belonged here, and it'll be good to see him around again without having to gird our minds against any unseemly thoughts about the lowlights of his political career. (Payday lenders, Miguel Estrada, Obamacare . . . . ) Enough of all that. He'll be just a neighbor again.
When and where did the senator pop the question? Well, the Pryors-to-Be had planned to go to a movie the other night at the Newseum, a place dedicated to the history of the news, which sounds entirely too much like business to some of us. But it was crowded. (Isn't any place crowded for two people in love?) So they wound up at Ted's Bulletin, a Washington chain restaurant specializing in good old American comfort food. And sweet pastries.
Comfort me with apples, for I am lovesick, as the Song of Solomon said a millennium or two ago. Some things never change, do they, thank God? The best dish was served after the meal by Mark Pryor himself, who proposed right then and there. Dessert on top of dessert. May the rest of their lives be as sweet.
Our best wishes to the bride, congratulations to the groom and to the happy couple's families, for happiness is a family affair.
Editorial on 12/16/2014