C’est Amore
Maybe it was Chabrier’s España rasping from the smartphone in the back pocket of the bright orange cycling shirt Susanne kindly brought me from Germany.
Or my slightly giddy feeling after the visit to Apt of my sister Delia, with whom I babbled about things no one else seems to care about but they really should, including the subject of this writing. Sometimes we finished each other’s sentences, which I found reassuring.
Or it was just being in France with the approaching full moon. Whatever the reason, I was thinking during my evening ride of the many meanings of the word “love.”
You and I know love in its purest form — none other than the joyous, God-ordained, not-even-death-will-us-part bond between human and dog, as depicted in the holiest of texts The Master and Margarita, by the totally Ukrainian author Mikhail Bulgakov.
But it has other meanings.
There’s the “Falling In” kind of love which, if you don’t take it nice ‘n’ easy, too soon lands in the “feel Like making” kind that, being to love what a Snickers Bar is to food, can make you lose interest in the healthy soufflé aux épinards on your plate.
Then there’s the “I love you” kind, which is a hundred different ones depending on context, each meaning, in essence, “Your annoying habits notwithstanding, I’m not going anywhere.”
In that regard, the love seeming to require the most care is the one-life-partner kind. Being a relatively recent human invention to supplant the historic decline of tribe and village, lifelong single partner love may seem alien to some. But if you get the knack, it supersedes everything else in your life while causing all of it to happen.
Love, then, first means “commitment.” 32 years later (and counting) it becomes a synonym for “gratitude.”
What’s weird about that kind is you perform most of the hard work on yourself — although it also involves things such as foot rubs and doing the dishes every night even though it wouldn’t have hurt the kids to get their hands wet. Just sayin’.
Speaking of which, the most powerful love has to do with parenting, which is another word for devoting your entire being to small people who will later only be able to take you in small doses (because parents really are infuriating.) It demands more labor than the life partner kind, and briefly takes over the latter. But you don’t notice because you’re in the zone and, for the first time, have an unquestioned reason for existing.
It took the internal drama of living in an African village for me to understand I needed to love my parents. Without an internet full of incredibly awesome role models to draw from, I wasn’t sure how to go about it. So I tried to imagine what other loving sons should do.
As a consequence, I accepted my mother for her choices and beliefs and embraced being my father’s son despite him being such a weirdo, and... presto! I was suddenly able to take my mother in small doses. (My dad took a bit longer.)
By then my love of travel yielded a career taking me away from both, so I can’t say I’ve been the best son. But I give myself points for trying. I’m welcome. And that, by the way, is the greatest love of all.
In our discussion on the topic of love, Delia offered “showing up” as one of love’s meanings. I like that. I also like its cousins, “being there,” “coming back,” and the ever-challenging, “climbing down.”
I’d add “keeping your mouth shut,” “calling once a week,” and “remembering important days,” except I suck at those kinds of love and so do most other people, so let’s move on.
One of my favorite definitions has to do with grammar. As Stephen Covey tells us in his monumentally over-simplistic work of self-help schlock that is totally worth re-reading called The 7 Habits, “love” is not a noun, not a thing, but a verb, an action, i.e. something you do with a degree of intention; the feeling of love follows.
That’s messed up, right? When young we wanted to be caught up in pure emotion, falling effortlessly into a crazy little thing called love and believing everything else would be perfect as a result.
As it turns out, the two are not mutually exclusive. But now love is something you achieve when, after thrashing about in the courtship hellscape through your 20s, you finally know who you are not.
Let’s not forget friendship, which is the kind of love when someone who has seen you at your worst during those thrashing years still smirks when, in your 60s, you do that thing where you hold a #2 pencil between your chin and lower lip.
One kind of love I’m curious about is the certainty many people have after sampling hallucinogens that all you need is love, which is the answer. Maybe I’ll try that love once they figure out how not to turn my brain into that egg sizzling in an overheated iron pan that none of you remembers but it’s on YouTube. Or I’ll meditate, which is cheaper and has less cholesterol.
Lastly, love is the above-and-beyond some of us put into whatever we’re doing, the kind only others might notice. Last week, for example, I told Joël Vilcoq in Manosque that no other chocolatier in Provence invests as much love in their product as he. He did not find my American sentimentality awkward at all.
If you’re still not convinced, consider our local pizza truck guy Lorenzo who works alone in a reconfigured 1978 Renault Estafette, driving to five towns each week. He can make at least six pies in one order and is fun to watch. The other night he messed up the oil on one of them (I never would have noticed,) said, “That’s my dinner” and set it aside, and started over.
Clearly, this is not just about making money. It’s about hitting your eye with a big pizza pie. I’ll be sad one day when he retires or closes his business, which can never be replicated.
“Love,” then, is code for disparate passions — a linguistic convenience representing their meeting point within the brain. What unites them are the senses of commitment, intent, acceptance, gratitude, bonding, reassurance - and, alas, the sadness experienced when the target of our affection one day leaves us, or we are taken from them.
But till then we play joyously with our dogs and ride under the moon to the rasps of Romantic music and babble with our loved ones, finishing each…
…other’s sentences.
