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Author
to Reader:
When I was over
forty, a man I had dated in college picked up my book The Dinosaur
Man at a distant Border’s Bookstore and then, as I had been fantasizing
for decades, picked up the phone and called me. We had not
been in touch for years, and although I had married,
raised children, started two careers, and divorced
during that time, I had also begun to long for this love
the way a compass yearns for north. Whenever I thought of
love, I swung toward the place I’d last seen him and
asked a hundred questions beginning with, “Are you
alive?” I did not kid myself into thinking I would ever
know the answers. Then on that evening when the phone
rang, his voice with its heavy freight of memories
hit me like a truck. My image of myself and the world--an
image that had both protected and constrained me--cracked
in a thousand places. I am sure I have never been more
surprised in my life.
Were we twenty years old again?
I wondered as I stood weak-kneed at the phone. Had
nothing of importance happened since he and I were lovers?
Or were we mature adults, with so much unshared experience
that we could not possibly know who was on the other
end of the line? “Did you ever join the Peace Corps?”
he asked. “Have you become a doctor? Where exactly
do you live?” “I don’t believe this,” I thought, as I began
filling in the blanks and opening my own storehouse
of questions. “But it’s happening! It’s happening at
last!” During most of that electric conversation we exchanged
memories as if the first order of business was to reestablish
the relationship that had flourished briefly between
two teenagers long ago. We called each other nicknames
that no-one had used for decades, we teased each other about
traits we no longer possessed, told ancient, out-dated
jokes, and laughed until we choked. “You haven’t changed
a bit!” we said to each other, and indeed the longer
we talked, the more the old feelings came racing back across
the broad, dark fields of memory, and the more I felt
that perhaps I had not been living a real life since
leaving college after all. I wondered if my whole adult
life had been a detour.
As our conversation continued,
we moved gradually closer. It felt as if we stood shoulder
to shoulder, then cheek to cheek with no hundreds of miles
in between. I wondered if I would still recognize the
smell of his hair and skin. I wondered what he was
wearing, and realized with a disagreeable jolt that
I had no idea how he dressed, what he did for a living,
or even what he looked like now.
Eventually there was a slight pause,
and the conversation shifted.
“Are you married?” he asked casually. “No longer,” I answered.
I took a deep breath. “And what about yourself?” “I’m
married,” he said, and my heart contracted. “Why did
you call?” I asked quickly, giving myself time to fit this
serious information into our teasing and flirting.
“Why now?” “I have been thinking about you for several
years,” he said carefully, his voice dropping. “If
you’re ever out this way, I want . . . .” He stumbled over
the word, and my heart opened again in spite of itself.
“I want . . . to take you to dinner.”
For a moment, I considered answering
his words instead of his voice, but no. “Dinner!” I
shouted. “Dinner! You fool!” And we both began laughing
so hard I thought I might cry. “Stay in touch,” we
told each other after trying to end the conversation a dozen
times. “Stay in touch.”
After hanging up, I wandered aimlessly
through the house. Nothing was as it had been an hour
before, and not a single thing could be taken for granted anymore.
Yet even as the familiar became strange, the strange grew
oddly familiar. When I went to bed and lay beneath
my skylight gazing up at the Milky Way, I felt I had
something in common with the stars. I couldn’t say what
it was, but it seemed that everything I had ever cared about
was spinning together through that clear, black night.
top
Invitation:
It is quite a shock
to see someone you know fall headlong in love. There is a
sudden loss of balance, some frantic teetering, and then
a plummet into an exciting but unknown state of mind.
It reminds me of the reckless boys who try to kayak
across Woods Hole passage when the wind is slamming the
sea in one direction and the tide sucking it in another.
A forest of ten foot waves rises on the back of a roaring
torrent so strong that it pulls three-ton channel markers
underwater and holds them there. Seeing a white-faced kayaker
return from the Hole is like seeing a person who has just
fallen for the love of his life.
When my blond, athletic son bumped
into an Australian girl at a pizza shop in the Alps
two days before his ski vacation ended, he returned home
a wreck. Pale and badly shaken, he stood stupidly in
my living room trying to explain why I had to lend
him six hundred dollars so he could fly back to Europe that evening.
“No,” I said, but I was smiling. The signs were unmistakable.
He had received the invitation. “I have a picture of
her,” he said, pulling an undeveloped roll of film from his
pocket and holding it in his hand as if it were the Hope
Diamond. “Mother, she’s . . . . I just can’t explain
it.”
What I think my son couldn’t explain,
was the emotional turmoil that made him suspect that
this beautiful, spirited, funny-sounding Australian was
the right woman for him. From his toes to the top of
his head and from his mind to the center of his heart
he was being flooded by unfamiliar yet instantly recognizable
signals that she was the one. As far as he was concerned,
the invitation to fall for the love of his life was
delivered when her blonde head popped over the booth
where he sat eating pizza. But was it the arrival of
the right girl or was it my son’s readiness for love that
finally opened the door? Lovers always say it’s the
person. Onlookers often think that the timing is just
as important. As King Lear says, “Ripeness is all.”
My son did not fly back to Europe
that night nor did he die on the spot.
Instead he rang up the most outrageous phone bills I had
ever seen until
summer finally rolled around and the Australian flew half
way around the
world to visit. The two made a handsome couple. Both slim,
athletic, and
perpetually tan, they swam, sailed, cycled, and generally
carried on, and
although she dislocated her shoulder water skiing and hurt
her knee cycling, she was so in love that she was willing
to leave family and job, finagle a working visa, and
move to the United States. “But I can’t ask her to do that,”
my son anguished. “What if it doesn’t work out? Of
course I want her here, but maybe I’m being selfish. How
can I ask her to give up so much?”
Although my son’s girlfriend pointed
out that the only question he had to answer was, “Do
you want to see me this fall?”--she’d figure out the rest--, still
he could not bring himself to let her take such an enormous
gamble after so short a time. Just before her two-week
vacation ended and she prepared to return down under,
the two agreed that they would make a decision by September
30. Either she’d move to the States or they would break
off the relationship.
The weeks ticked by. The phone
bills mounted. By the end of August my son was taking
long, solitary walks. By September, he was talking earnestly
with friends. When I saw him on the twenty-eighth of
the month, however, the tension was gone from his face
and he was beaming from ear to ear. “What’s the deal?” I
asked curiously. “Roses,” he whispered. “Lots and lots of
roses.” Later I learned that on September twenty-ninth,
the lovely Australian went to work as usual and did
not notice that the receptionist in her office was purple
with excitement. At ten o’clock, this same receptionist
assembled everyone except my son’s girlfriend in the
company’s conference room where to their surprise they
saw a bouquet of five dozen red, yellow, and pink roses
tied with a blood-red ribbon from which hung a small pink
envelope.
Then, completely unaware of what
was going on, The Right Girl was called into the conference
room. A moment of confusion, a split-second of surprise,
and then three months of longing and uncertainly dissolved
in tears. She wept as she tore open the envelope, and
sobbed as she took out the card. “I love you. I need
you. Come to Boston!”
When the applause died down, she
smiled through her tears and said simply, “How soon
can I leave?” This is the way love’s invitation is supposed
to come to us--directly, unambiguously, and dramatically.
And this is how it is supposed to be answered--”Yes!”
But how often does it actually happen this way?
As Myrna Loy was fond of saying,
“Looking for love with all its catastrophes is a less risky
experience than finding it.” In the stories that follow
we will see what happens to people who have a harder
time with love’s invitation. Some accept a riskier
and more complicated proposition; others postpone their acceptance
for decades; still others reject the invitation, cleanly
or sloppily; and finally, some people never receive
one.
top
Work:
“When my mother was dying at home,”
a friend of mine said, “the hospice
worker came out of her room one afternoon and asked, ‘Who’s
Jimmy? Your mother’s been talking about him for hours.
’“When I went in, Mother talked about me which I liked because
she said some very nice things, but later that evening
I heard it too. As she lay drifting in and out of consciousness,
poor thing, she said she was in a hurry because she
had to meet Jimmy at the real estate office. She was excited
and eager in a feeble sort of way. I got the impression
they were going to buy a house. “When my sister flew in,
I asked her if she knew Jimmy. No-one did, but Mother
kept talking about him until . . . well, until she died.
We read her will then and learned that the one thing
she insisted on was to be buried wearing the diamond
and garnet ring that she had always worn. It wasn’t worth
much, so no-one minded. We thought it was her engagement
ring, but one of our relatives said it wasn’t. She
told us it was given to Mother years ago by her best
friend’s mother-in-law. Her best friend’s husband was Jimmy.”
“So your mother and Jimmy . . ?” “Nobody knows; it’s a mystery.
He died many years before mother.” My friend paused. “All
these years, and she never said a word... Yet a romance
with all its ups and downs was going on inside her. My definition
of the love of a lifetime is the person you get ready
to meet when you’re dying.”
Author
to Reader
Conclusion:
It seems to me that
the love of a lifetime is for many of us the one
time in our lives when we experience life in its pure, raw
form. The
guardian angels Common Sense, Reason, and Decency desert
us, and we are left alone to suffer the desire to be
alive in its most intense and most heartbreaking form.
We discover for ourselves and in ourselves a force of immense
power--a vital, resonant desire that is amplified almost
unbearably when we connect without restraint to another
person and which reaches through that person to everything
else. We realize then that the treasure bestowed by
the love of our lives is not only the enjoyment of the beloved,
however wonderful that may be, but also the expansion
in our hearts that makes everything under the sun precious
to us.
There is no way to enter this meaningful
world without giving ourselves over to an experience
that means everything to us yet can neither be controlled nor
explained. The Dutch theologian Henry Nouwen said that nothing
of importance is accomplished by anyone until and unless
they embrace this experience and feel welcomed by the
world. Katharine Hepburn learned that we don’t experience
love by figuring out what we want, but by discovering what we
can give--which must be everything. Rumi said that a lover’s
food is the love of bread, not the bread. And I say,
don’t discount the love of your life if it does not
conform to our culture’s narrow picture of easy, endless love.
True love is complicated, and its lessons, both bitter and
sweet, are too valuable to be lost. To embark upon
a lifetime of love, you must first embrace the love
of your life--your heart’s most courageous journey. The
love of a lifetime reveals, teaches, and transforms.
When it hits:
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It blasts away the innocent picture we have of ourselves
and reveals a passionate, complex person hungry
for life. |
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It
reveals our lack of control over what matters most
and throws us into a storm of unexpected
vulnerability and vitality. |
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It separates us from our past. |
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It teaches us to commit to a relationship in spite
of the possibility of loss. |
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It teaches us to let go of the controls and give
ourselves over to love. People prove to themselves
they are lovable by giving not getting love. |
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It prompts us to value the parts of the world that
no-one can explain. |
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It fires our imagination and expands our possibilities. |
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It pushes us to believe in ourselves. |
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It gives us a strength called by many names--an
inner certainty that is
stronger and more important that outside events. |
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It prepares us for a lifetime of love. |
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