Wine comes in at the mouth 

And love comes in at the eye; 

That’s all we shall know for truth 

Before we grow old and die. 

I lift the glass to my mouth, 

I look at you, and I sigh.

                         (A Drinking Song: William Butler Yeats)

 

Whether you’ve recently “fallen off the horse” or are just getting “back in the saddle,” or are happily wrapped up snug with your true soulmate, the inevitability of falling in love (again, and again) seems to be a truth universally acknowledged, as Jane Austen would say. Along with oxygen, water, and food, we crave love.

One of the great things about falling in love is that you never know when it’s coming. On your worst day, in your darkest hour, it’s entirely possible you will turn a corner and bump right into your heart’s desire. Neurons will release a flood of feel-good dopamine in your brain. The sun will feel sunnier. “All the world loves a lover,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. But when it comes to romance, the smart money’s on Shakespeare: “The course of true love never did run smooth.”

When Love Comes in at the Eye     

Wallis Simpson, that perky American socialite, was twice-and-still married when she met England’s King Edward VIII. Their love caused a tremendous scandal when the king abdicated his throne to marry her in 1937. “You have no idea how hard it is to live out a great romance,” Simpson told the press.

The fact that love catches us unaware means it can go in many directions, assume many forms. Though Simpson caught a lot of flak for her royal romance, at least she had her newly-dethroned husband to share the backlash with. But what if she’d found herself in love with King Edward VIII from afar? If, say, she was on the palace payroll and it had been her job to bring the king’s slippers to the royal billiard room every day at 4 p.m., where she would be permitted to (discreetly) stare at his magnificent form for thirty seconds before banishing herself to swoon and gnash her teeth in the outer hall?

That’s unrequited love, and while those in the throes of break-up agony may tell you how lucky you are, most of us find one-sided love somewhat unfulfilling and awkward. You have to invent endless, ridiculous reasons to spend snippets of time with the object of your adoration—snippets in which it must appear your interest is completely platonic. It’s one thing to feel pathetic privately—you can keep a secret—but the worst thing that can happen to you as the enamored party in unrequited love is to be found out.

Yet, when “love comes in at the eye,” it’s a rare person who can look away. Even from that most futile of all romances—the long distance crush.

Love From Afar 

During the latter part of a difficult marriage, I saw Colin Firth in Love Actually. To say I was utterly gobsmacked would be a serious understatement. I’d been a fan of Firth since I first saw him in A Month in the Country. Thought him a talented actor. Had seen many of his films, including Bridget Jones’s Diary (in which any sane woman would have melted instantly into a flaming puddle). But it was not until that moment in 2004, out-of-love in real life, that I stared at the screen and wondered why I’d never realized just how gorgeous, funny, sexy, smart Firth was.

Anonymity in love has its obvious pains but it also has its pleasures. For three happy years, I chattered about all things Colin on a fansite with my (I’m not making this up) “Firthsisters.” I had it so bad, I drove all the way to the Toronto Film Festival hoping he’d show up to promote his new film (he didn’t).

But the experience, overall, was joyful, giddy, energizing—all those reasons we love falling in love. I met lots of fun, lively women on the fansite with whom I shared a billion laughs as well as some memorable photos (one Aussie Firthsister was especially skilled at getting great “stills” from films where Colin had a shower scene). And it rescued me at a time when I was in the limbo cycle of love. You know, the one where you keep asking yourself What was I thinking?

I Must Have Been Bonkers    

When we fall in love, we tend to zero in on some things about the object of our affection and ignore others, sometimes HUGE others. I call this “messages we should have paid attention to.” My favorite of all time is the woman who confessed that, when they were dating, her future husband remarked “I’m just not that into relationships.”

This is the phase in some romances where the person who loves world travel grinds their teeth over the partner for whom travel is a trip from the recliner to the fridge. It’s the moment (or years) when the social butterfly who loves to dance and mingle realizes they’re shackled to a dead moth. It’s the standoff between those who crave intimacy and those for whom stonewalling is not a reference to the 1969 LGBTQ uprising in Greenwich Village, but an eternal, defensive silence.

Discovering that you and your honey are in the square-peg/round-hole configuration doesn’t necessarily end a romance. I know Democrats who have been married to Republicans for decades (wonder how they’re doing now), and urbanites who settled with backwoodsy types. Power to them, but when one or both people have to give up too much of what they love, or compromise too much of who they are, moving on may be the healthiest, least painful choice.

Depending on how long you’ve lived with your stalemate (apologies for the pun), and a whole bunch of personality analytics I have neither the space nor time to research here, moving on may be a HUGE relief. Or you may spend some time licking your wounds in romance hell. This is usually the place where people vow to: 1) join a convent; 2) build a yurt in a remote corner of Mongolia; 3) hire a hitman.

The Heartbreak of Heartbreak      

In her autobiography, actress Vanessa Redgrave recounts the time she was dumped by her husband Tony Richardson for another actress whose film he was directing. She’d come to visit him on location, completely clueless, and he gave her the news. She described the long evening she spent in a little seaside bar, playing over and over every sad song on the jukebox.

Heartbreak is definitely the basement bummer of romantic love—the roughest part of love’s bumpy ride—and most of us have logged in some time there. I remember sitting in the living room of my Boston apartment after a breakup, a bottle of Jameson’s by my side, a stack of weepy records on the stereo (shades of Redgrave), watching my roommate paint the living room.

If I’d only known I would join a writing group two weeks later and fall in love again, I might have got my derrière off that chair and picked up a brush. But then, love is always a surprise. If you want to get to the Bliss, you have to throw yourself out there and take a chance on happiness.

The Bliss      

Oh, the high of falling in love. It’s what leads poets to write stuff like “You are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing.” (e.e. cummings) It’s why we can’t pack it in and join that convent/monastery. Or become a hermit in the back of beyond.

This flawed and fabulous thing that is love answers our deepest longings to know and be known. The universe is infinite but we are very finite. In our short hour, we seek someone who will grasp who we are and love us for all that. 

When my first marriage was breaking up, I wondered if I’d ever get seriously involved again. I was feeling a bit burnt out at the time. It seemed more attractive to embrace my freedom. Move to London. Focus solely on my writing, and limit romance to the occasional fling.

At the time, I was spending much of my day in a local coffee bar, writing freelance articles for magazines. A number of regulars frequented the place, and on a Friday afternoon one of them touched me on the shoulder as he left, and wished me a good weekend.

That was 10 years ago this summer, and the man (we’ll call him Ed because that’s his name) turned out to be the love of my life. The winning ticket in the lottery that is romance.

“The heart never really shuts up,” one character says in a novel I penned some years back.

It may not be elegant prose. But it’s true.

 

 

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”       ( John Lennon)

I don’t know about you, but I gave up making New Year’s resolutions somewhere back in Obama’s first administration. Instead, I started making action plans, neat little Word-generated tables with 3-hour writing blocks and chunks of time allocated to house projects, gardening, agent searches, and guitar playing. No negativity allowed. I will write from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. each day. I will clean the attic, organize the pantry, query two agents every week, and figure out how my Nikon camera works.

Every December, after the holiday hoopla subsided, I made a new action plan. Another attempt to quantify my time and direct my life. Imposing a strict limit of 15 minutes for e-mail and social media twice a day, I could feel my muscles tense each time I signed into my Google accounts (both professional and personal), then ripped through the tangle of likes, retweets, and new follows on Twitter, before sprinting to the finish line on Facebook, exhausted and always 20 to 200 minutes behind schedule.

The Best Laid Plans … 

The problem with life is that it refuses to lie down and be compartmentalized. My perfectly-constructed little blocks allocating hours to this or that goal were always under siege. The car broke down. A filling fell out of my tooth. The cat got sick. The hot water heater flooded the basement. Unlike laundry (which you can always do at 2 a.m. after all your other to-dos are done), most schedule interrupters just … erupt. And there goes your plan.

One of my favorite illustrations of this is a story my neighbor told. When he was in his 20s, Matt decided to celebrate his college graduation by hiking the Appalachian Trail end to end before starting a graduate program. A consummate planner, Matt did his research and talked to others who had made the trek. He assembled the recommended equipment, and a month before departure, drove the entire trail, stopping to bury caches of food and water at each night’s designated camp spot. Goal set. Prep done. Game on.

But Matt got sick the week before his departure and had to be hospitalized. By the time he recovered, the summer was gone and his graduate program was about to start. By the end of that, he was married. He spent the next 25 years raising four kids. If those caches of food are still out there, they’ll be celebrating their golden anniversary soon. Personally, I like to imagine some grateful bears unearthed them.

New Year New You (and Other Inanities)

This morning, at the gym, I saw a TV ad: New Year, New You! That perennial January favorite that lures us into believing we can will events to synchronize with our goals. But unless you’ve won the $10,000,000 lottery recently, and can pay others to handle all the annoying curve balls life throws, I predict 2017 will look remarkably like every other year you’ve lived. Stuff will go wrong. Stuff will break down. You’ll break down. And everything you thought would take two hours to accomplish will take three hours. Or three days.

New Year, New You? I think The Who nailed it, bang on truth, when they sang Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss (“Won’t Get Fooled Again”).

“New Year, New You” also suggests there needs to be a new you, but I’m willing to bet there’s nothing wrong with the old you. Maybe you want to curb your habit of checking your Twitter feed every 15 minutes, or limit your online Solitaire games to something reasonable like 50 a day, but basically there’s nothing wrong with you or me that a 48-hour day wouldn’t fix.

One of the most depressing documents I ever saw was a calendar for 2013 (this was in November of 2012) filled with events and appointments all the way through to December of the coming year. It wasn’t even my calendar, but it made me want to hide under the covers for the next twelve months.

Struggling to adhere to an airtight schedule, with day upon day of little boxes to tick, just zaps the joy from life. And the stress of trying to plan for every contingency, doubled by the distress of managing the interruptions you didn’t and couldn’t foresee—Surprise! Your cousin and her kids just came to stay for two weeks—leads to a life of  wolfing down meals, working past midnight, ignoring friends, and the endless sinking feeling that you’re always running behind. When free time dwindles to a 15-minute slot every Tuesday, and a dinner out with your partner is just one more item to be checked off, you may find yourself wondering what’s the point? Don’t ignore that question. It’s the voice of sanity.

Anyone who knows me will tell you there is nothing as determined as a determined Amy, but doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results is the definition of stupidity. I may be ambitious, but I’m not stupid. So I keep searching for the better mousetrap.

Happiness is Sanity (Or Close Enough)

This January 1, I decided to take a new approach. One that puts a premium on inner peace and happiness. Call it a mental health year. I began by listing the things I’d like to do more of in 2017, the things that make me happy:

1. Writing fiction
2. Spending more fun time with my husband Ed
3. Interesting cooking (something more exciting than fall-back, rush meals of omelets or packaged pasta)
4. Playing guitar
5. Reading
6. House projects (as opposed to house cleaning)
7. Connecting with friends

 

 

That’s it. No boxes to tick. No word counts. No limits. Just a list of the things I love doing.

Atop my file cabinet, behind my desk, sits a card with an Annie Dillard quote: How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

I want to spend mine happily.

 

 

“You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.” Lennon/McCartney

When I was in my teens and early twenties, I spun out countless hours with friends, talking, dreaming, confiding, laughing. Life hurtled toward us at a dizzying speed. High school to college. Graduation to first jobs. In the constant rush of forward motion—new situations, new people—it was easy to lose track of old friends. To not even realize you were losing track.

We two have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun till dine;
But seas between us broad have roared
since auld lang syne.

Auld Lang Syne: Robert Burns [English translation from original Scots verse]                      

 

Friendships rarely end in dramatic confrontations. Changing circumstances—jobs, marriage, kids—or changing values and  philosophies take their toll. Not all friendships are anchored enough to withstand the inevitable drift and spin of time.

Out for an evening of dancing and beers with twenty of your “best friends” in college, the thing you don’t yet realize is that very few people will go with you through life. Or how precious those few people—the ones who knew you when you were young—will become. Even though a continent may lie between you. Even when communications are few and face time is rare.

Old friends don’t fade. Seen through the eyes of love, they acquire a timeless beauty. Forever young. A cherished buffer against the rough and tumble of the world. A bright beacon in the hazy uncertainties of the future. They are the ones from which nothing must or can be hidden. They know us through and through, and somehow love us just the same.

Old friends. This post is for them.

 

 

Time it was 
And what a time it was, it was 
A time of innocence 
A time of confidences

Long ago it must be 
I have a photograph 
Preserve your memories 
They’re all that’s left you.

(“Bookends”: Paul Simon)

 

Like the taste of the madeleine cake Proust’s Narrator dips in his tea in Swann’s Way, a smell, a song, an object can viscerally evoke a moment from our past. Years drop away. We experience again the heat or cold, the doubt or certainty, the grief or exultation of a younger self.

The holiday season—whether you celebrate Hanukkah or Diwali, Kwanzaa or Christmas—is ripe with “madeleine” moments for most of us. Our individual traditions are both the result of and prompt for a host of treasured memories.

We remember moments that took us outside ourself and expanded our awareness of the world.

Opening the boxes of tree ornaments each year, I find myself kneeling again beside a large Mayflower storage carton, lifting out the red and green glass balls, the silver angels and cotton-bearded Santas of my childhood. At the bottom of the box, I discover a postcard. A photo of a place my mother tells me is the French Quarter in a city called New Orleans where she and my dad honeymooned. I’m not quite four years old, and this is the first time I understand that a world with my parents in it existed before me.

For some years to come, I’ll check each Christmas to make sure the postcard is still there. To marvel at this New Orleans neighborhood, so different from my Midwestern landscape of single-story clapboard and brick houses, apple orchards and snow. But most of all, to wonder at my parents—these staid people who never go to the movies or play records. How is it possible they were young and romantic in this place of Mardi Gras debauchery with its jazz clubs and zydeco musicians?

The postcard has long vanished, as have the ornaments with a few exceptions. My father is dead, and I left the Midwest years ago. But I never trim the tree without recalling that postcard, its power undiminished to evoke those childhood Christmases. Its lessons: That I was not the center of the universe, but the newest link in a timeless chain. That how we see other people is always the tip of the iceberg, never the whole.

Sometimes a memory extends so far back, it defies our ability to place its origin. It simply seems to encompass our entire existence.

At the top of our tree is wedged a little silver glass dog. One of the few survivors I mentioned.  The delicate curl on his back that took an ornament hanger is broken. He is missing his snout and one leg. As the ornament from my first Christmas, he’s been with me virtually my whole life. Each December, I lift him from his cloth cocoon with care and reverence because in some strange Druidic way, this little dog is the repository of my life, the oldest witness to my existence. If he were to fall and shatter, I would mourn that lost link to my past.

Memories also possess the power to recall and strengthen our emotional connections. Like time-lapse photography, the moment we are sharing today with loved ones is a moment we have shared across decades.

Around the time my children were born, I watched Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, that Christmas film of all Christmas films. It became an annual staple at our house. Curled up together on the big bed in the late December dark, we watched a young, impassioned Jimmy Stewart lose faith in himself, then through a long, dark journey, rediscover the light. In this time warp, my  children are again 5 and 2, 12 and 9, adolescents morphing into young adults. If we were scattered far and wide, none of us could watch this film without conjuring the others. “No man is a failure who has friends” and nothing matters more than the people we love.

Perhaps the memories hardest to explain are those moments when we were awed by the sheer beauty of existence.  

When I was seven, I went caroling with a church group. I don’t remember what songs we sang. I do recall that it was freezing and that one house gave us hot chocolate (for which I felt both grateful and shy). Had that been the evening, I doubt I would remember anything more than the fact of the event.

But the last house we stopped at was the home of our new church organist. After we sang, his wife invited us into a narrow hallway cluttered with coats and bicycles. At the top of the stairwell that led to their apartment, stood the organist. In gratitude for our songs, he offered to sing one to us. The song was “O Holy Night.”  His voice, a pure, clear tenor. I stood in that shadowy vestibule, spellbound.

To this day, the opening notes of that carol transport me back to the moment with its clanking steam radiators, smell of damp mittens, and the most profound peace I have ever known.

The persistence of memory. Sometimes hard, sometimes a balm. Both gift and wonder.

In a fragment from my own bad poetry, age 19:

What we love

Is not the new, the beautiful, the unscarred

But the stained, the torn,

The weathered and broken of

Time and knowing. 

Whatever celebrations you observe this season, as the earth once again emerges from darkness into the light, I wish you the joy of reliving many long-cherished moments, and the delight of creating new ones.

Above all, I wish you Peace.

 

If you can keep your integrity when all about you are losing theirs … (riffing on Rudyard Kipling)

In May 2013, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell (The Last Word) devoted his “Rewrite” segment to Keystone Sporting Arms founders Bill McNeal and his son Steve.

KSA manufactures guns for children. (Let that sink in for a moment.) Among the logo rights the company owns is “My First Rifle.”

On April 30, 2013, Caroline Sparks of Kentucky died when her 5-year-old brother accidentally shot her with KSA’s “Crickett”, a .22-caliber youth rifle he’d received the year before, a birthday gift.

[It was] “just one of those crazy accidents,” Gary White, the local coroner, said. “It’s a little rifle for a kid … The little boy’s used to shooting the little gun.”

O’Donnell had a slightly different take. He blasted the McNeals as “greedy death merchants” and labeled a KSA website promo pic of a baby holding a rifle as “legal child pornography.”

He then related a story about his own father turning down an opportunity to invest in a liquor store because “he had seen booze destroy too many lives, and kill too many people.” His father told the young O’Donnell “there are some things you don’t do for money.”

“I’m guessing [the McNeals] never talked about what they would not do to make money,” O’Donnell said, “because what they decided to do, as a father and son team in a small town in Pennsylvania, was start a company to make guns and sell guns for children.

“You would think one of the McNeals would have had the good sense to say, ‘If we make guns for little kids, someone is going to get killed. Well, if one of them said that, the other one must have said ‘Yeah, but we can get rich,’ and getting rich mattered more to the McNeals than someone getting killed.”

I’ve thought about that story many times in the years since it aired. As money continues to ascend in its power, wiping out all other definitions of what matters in life. As more and more politicians sell themselves to the NRA, the Koch brothers, and big Pharma. As climate change escalates, unchecked, because to take action to save our planet would decrease the multi-billion-dollar profits of fossil fuel magnates.

What would you not do for money?

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I jotted down a few responses to that question.

Things I Would Not Do For Money

1) Murder or injure another person.

2) Take a job as a lobbyist or spokesperson shilling for the fossil fuel or chemical industries, Big Pharma or Wall Street.

I’ve actually had experience with this one. As an English major, there weren’t a ton of companies rushing my college campus to sign me up. The recruitment center, however, did offer me an interview with Dow Chemical. They were looking for a writer and the starting salary was twice what anyone else was paying students of Shakespeare and Faulkner. But I turned down the interview. In fact, I remember being amused by the irony of it all: I’d just been involved in a campus protest against Dow two weeks before.

3) Publicly advocate a position different to my actual beliefs.

4) Take something that doesn’t belong to me.

5) Betray someone. Anyone.

6) Write to the market—what I think will sell—rather than follow my heart.

Unlike numbers 1-5, this is not a moral question. People write for many different reasons. If you have writing chops, it’s perfectly ethical to use those skills to make a living. I’ve written many non-fiction articles for magazines and newspapers. But my novels and short stories have a deeper, different meaning. I revere fiction above all other forms of writing. The best of it informs us, transforms us, gives shape and meaning to human experience. Though I hope to publish my fiction, when it comes to choosing what to write, I take the line of the late anti-Apartheid activist and writer Stephen Biko: I write what I like.

As I developed this list, I realized the question of what one would refuse to do for money comes in a multitude of guises. There’s the illegal and immoral, the perfectly legal but morally murky, and the personally repugnant. I became curious how others would answer the question, so I e-mailed a handful of friends to solicit their responses.

Money Can’t Buy Me Trust

Several people echoed Maribeth F., who wrote: “Not certain how to answer this as there are so many things I would NOT do for money.”

She goes on to tell about a time she was asked to lie at work. “I said no, my reputation is the most valuable thing I own. I will not compromise that. People at work knew that they could trust whatever I said. That level of trust got me through really tough times such as taking positions that were not popular, having to lay people off, confront bad behavior, dealing with potential lawsuits, etc. These challenges helped me to find my voice which overall helped me to confront people when I needed to or chose to.”

In an interesting twist, it turns out there are some things we might do, but not for pay. As Kathleen D. put it: “I who have told lies on occasion would not lie for money.”

Singer/songwriter Cyndi Lauper said it best: Money changes everything.

Love Trumps Money

Most responders noted they would not violate personal relationships for money. Apropos of the 1993 movie Indecent Proposal, where a rich man offers a young husband $1,000,000 for a night with his wife, several people said no amount of money could induce them to cheat on their spouse. Ed M. said the promise of money wouldn’t persuade him to neglect the people he loves or the things he loves to do. Tom R. said he wouldn’t change his identity for money or cut ties with his friends and family.

Promises of Fame and Fortune

Toni R. reported that she wouldn’t set a forest fire for money. She lives in the South where wildfires have been raging since mid-October, adversely affecting air quality and forcing the evacuation of thousands. While it’s thought that a lightning strike, not arson, was responsible for starting the Rough Ridge fire in Georgia, police suspect arson has played a part in the rapid spread of such fires across drought-ravaged forests in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky.

How many arsonists might be involved is unclear at this time. In one case, however, we do know that fame served as a surrogate motive for money. An aspiring weatherman from Kentucky admitted to starting a forest fire to draw people to his selfie videos on Facebook. The 21-year-old was jailed for arson, but not before racking up some 3,000 views on social media. The man said he enjoys the attention.

Arson brings up another facet of the money question: What would you not do for profit? The intentional burning of rain forests in Indonesia and Malaysia to clear land for oil palm plantations releases large quantities of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Highly injurious to people’s health and the planet, oil palm plantations yield big profits for companies like Colgate-Palmolive and PepsiCo because palm oil is cheap and has a long shelf life.

Respect for Self

Although all the responses I received involve de facto respect for oneself—the unwillingness to violate one’s principles for the purpose of legal or illegal gain—Tom R. addressed the issue directly. “I wouldn’t risk my life [for money] in a stunt—trying to cross Niagara Falls on a tightwire comes to mind … and I wouldn’t undergo unnecessary surgery.” Tom is a retired lawyer turned actor, but I’m guessing he won’t be lining up for Botox injections or a facelift any time soon. He’s not willing to gamble his health or personal safety.

 

What’s In a Name?

The question of what one would not do for money speaks directly to the issue of personal integrity. It acknowledges that some considerations rank higher than money—perhaps many, if my small sample has any validity. It concedes that such a thing as a moral compass may yet exist, and be valued. That integrity brings its own riches, beside which money looks both dirty and cheap.

Arthur Miller spoke to integrity in The Crucible, a play in which the Salem witch trials mirror Joe McCarthy’s “witch hunt” for Communists in the 1950s. McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) didn’t offer people cash to sell out their friends and colleagues, but they threatened their freedom and their jobs.

Like the principled men and women who stood up to HUAC, when John Proctor is asked at the close of The Crucible to betray his neighbors and perjure himself to save his own skin, he refuses. The officials are shocked. They try to convince him that throwing his own life away is a graver sin than informing on his friends, but he’s having none of it. Wringing their hands, they ask why, for God’s sake, does he refuse to sign his name to their trumped-up confession? It’s just a signature.

And he tells them: Because it is my name. Because I cannot have another in my life.

That’s integrity.

[Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this post.]