Today, Jamie Callan recounts her courtship with the man who would become her second husband.  It started out as a college teacher/student (albeit older, returning to school after a divorce, student) relationship.  I must admit being a bit nervous as I started to read, having witnessed various teacher/student liaisons over the years, some of which have gone terribly wrong.  In any event, my qualms were eased by the obvious maturity of Callan and her paramour, now husband.

      She is a teacher of writing and makes a question about the use of the semicolon into a symbol of her connection with her student:

THAT night I read in “Woe Is I” by Patricia T. O’Conner that the
semicolon is like a blinking yellow light between two connected but
independent sentences. You read through the first sentence, but before
going to the next, the semicolon warns you to slow down and look both
ways.

I told this to my student, and he seemed pleased. Not just
pleased with the information but with the fact that I had looked it up
just for him. I suspect he also must have been pleased about the
meaning itself, about proceeding with caution, because that’s how he
and I proceeded in whatever it was we were or weren’t doing.

    She returns to this image at the end of the piece, when they allow their friendship to transform into something closer:

By then I knew the rules of grammar all too well, or at least I knew
the rule about the semicolon. My student and I had minded the semicolon
and proceeded from the first sentence of our relationship to the second
with greater caution than surely any semicolon in history had ever
required. But my daughter had left for Los Angeles to spend time with
her father. A year earlier my mother had died. There wasn’t a single
semicolon or any other punctuation to delay us, so my student and I
proceeded quickly.

And now we are married.

     The things that made the "semicolon" – the caution to proceed toward a more permanent commitment – necessary were the prior obligations Callan had in her life: to her mother, who was dying of cancer; to her daughter, who needed her time and attention.   She and her student (who turns out to be older than she) could not combine their lives until she had taken care of her other family duties. 

    How admirable.  Too often we hear stories of people abandoning their current responsibilities to chase some vision of independence and love.  Here is someone who maintained a sense of proportion in her life: she did the right things first and then was still able to make what she wanted out of her affection for this student. 

     This is a comforting story for me right now.  My wife and I are both deeply embedded in family duties: she watches over her mother and father, who live in our town and are in increasing need of daily help; and I keep an eye on my aunt and sister, who also live in our town and require assistance.  Together, we both care for our daughter, who is twelve going on whatever.  There is little time outside of these demands, and work, for us to feel like we are  addressing our own needs and desires.  For us, it seems to be all semicolon and no second sentence.

    Callan’s story helps because, in a Confucian sort of way, it reminds me that we are, indeed, defined by how we attend to our social responsibilities.  Taking care of our family members is not something that takes us away from what we can or should be: it is what we are.  Without the daily work of family relationships (even when we do this work imperfectly), without that semicolon, there would be no next line of our lives.  The sentence breaks apart when the semicolon is removed.