| Cathleen Falsani

Parents smooching in public? It’s a miraculous thing

You think you know people.

Take my parents, for instance.

Recently I discovered that they had a secret. A long-kept secret, apparently known to almost everyone except my brother and me. A secret so shocking I’m still pretty verklempt about it.

They kiss.

In public.

All. The. Time.

At restaurants. At parties. In church, for the love of Pete. In fact, it was at their church that their cover was blown. It was my father’s 75th birthday. The church had a party for him. There was a slide show. There were pictures. Kissing pictures.

Apparently, to their fellow congregants, my parents, Muzzy and Helen, who are blessedly spry septuagenarians, are known as the kissing couple. Everyone knew. EVERYONE!

A little background: My parents — he’s Italian, she’s Irish — are quite affectionate, passionate people. Just not generally with each other, or at least not with each other in the presence of their two children. They lavish my brother and my husband and me with love and hugs and kisses every time we see them. Everyone says, “I love you.” The men in my family even kiss hello and goodbye — with each other. Uncles. Cousins. Nephews. Hugs are a requisite.

But to my knowledge, in all of my 35 years, until that fateful Sunday morning a few months back, I had seen my parents kiss on the lips for more than a peck only once. It was their anniversary — probably around No. 20 or so because I was a teenager and my brother was still an annoying little kid shooting off bottle rockets with the older cousins — at a barbecue in my Uncle Satch’s backyard.

Satch is my mother’s older brother. They have what I like to think is an affectionately antagonistic relationship. My uncle egged her on, “C’mon, Sis. Give Muzz a kiss!” And then Mom and Dad had this awkward, vaguely lusty kiss. I think I was 13. I know I was horrified.

I don’t know why, exactly. I wasn’t horrified 20 years later when I saw a slide show of my parents basically making out at a church party. I was touched, and a little bit wistful. Maybe they’d been secretly snogging all these years when my brother and I weren’t looking. They’ve been married 42 years. Frankly, I certainly hope they were.

While the kissing secret has taken some getting used to (they still don’t do it in front of us), one of the things I’ve always loved to do was watch my parents dance. They are of the generation that really knows how to dance. They don’t dance at each other or near each other. They dance with each other, gracefully, effortlessly.

There is something beautiful about watching two people who have been a couple for more than half of their lives maneuver their way across a dance floor, whether they’re gifted hoofers or not. It’s an unspoken negotiation, part of the pattern of a life they’ve made together and know by heart.

A few blocks away from my home in Oak Park, there is a restaurant that hosts live jazz music a couple of nights a week. In a tiny alcove next to the bar and in back of the band, several regulars dance on a small patch of floor. There is a couple there, regulars in their 70s, that reminds me very much of Muzz and Helen. He’s a little shorter and a bit of a ham. She’s a little taller and kind of, well, flinty.

Sometimes I go watch that Oak Park couple dance when I’m homesick for my parents in New England. It makes me smile. I don’t know them, but they seem like they’ve been married for many years. Who knows what their marriage is like, whether it’s mostly joyful, or mostly painful. When they are on the dance floor, it’s inspiring.

The give and take. Steps backward and forward and to the side. Dips and twirls and cheek-to-cheek.

Just like my parents. Theirs has not always been a peaceful, joyous union. But it is now.

I’m not sure exactly what makes it work. Love. Commitment to each other. Commitment to the commitment they made one rainy June day in 1963. Patience. Long-suffering. Faith. In each other. In their God.

Whatever it is, they’re still dancing. And kissing. And these days, that’s a sure enough miracle.

Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson didn’t even last four years, never mind four decades. I watched every dang episode of all three seasons of “The Newlyweds” on MTV, cheering the doe-eyed couple on, yelling at her ditsy mother and creepy father to leave the kids alone and go back to their own mansion.

Who knows why Nick and Jessica didn’t wind up the fairy tale we all — OK, not all of us, but I, for one — hoped they would be. She saved herself! Her dad was a pastor! Why? Why?

It seemed they shared a common faith. But sadly, faith alone does not a marriage make. Or save. (If memory serves, about 50 percent of all American marriages end in divorce, including those among churchgoing, born-again Christians.)

I was thinking about all of this over the weekend while listening to Debbie Elliott interview “Chicago’s own” Liz Phair about her new album on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

Phair, who since her seminal 1993 album “Exile in Guyville” has been married and divorced, has never been one of my favorites, but I must admit the title track of her new album, “Somebody’s Miracle,” is pretty terrific. It’s a lovely, moving confession about hope and doubt and regret and faith. And it made me think of my parents, the ones kissing in the picture over there.

Listen to some of the words: “I’m so far, so far away from it now/That it seems like I may never know how/People stay in love for half of their lives/It’s a secret they keep between husbands and wives/Baby, there goes somebody’s miracle/Walking down the street/There goes some other fairy tale. …”

In the radio interview, Phair explained that the song was about finding meaning in things as we grow older that we took for granted when were younger. “Things that are simple as people staying in love for a long time kind of inspires awe in me now,” Phair said.

My parents are a miracle, walking down the street.

Hand in hand.

Attached at the lips.