This is my place for posting musings, opinions, insights, baloney, poetry, and anything else I feel like putting here.  I'm going to start out with a few quotes, and a poem by a friend.  The theme of the moment is "Love".  Why?  Because it's one thing that everyone spends a heck of a lot of time pondering, falling in to, falling out of, being disappointed in, being thrilled with, and just generally having on their minds.  Well, I do, anyway.   

"You can see them alongside the shuffleboard courts in Florida or on the porches of the old folks' homes up north . . . they are in love, they have always been in love, although sometimes they would have denied it.  And because they have been in love they have survived everything that life could throw at them, even their own failures."

Ernest Havemann, on a long married couple, "Love and Marriage", Life magazine, September, 1961

     Not long ago, driving through town past a park, I saw a couple, in their 70's probably, walking hand in hand, laughing.  It was a beautiful image.  I can't possibly know what they laughed about, but the idea of reaching that age, having love alive enough still to want to walk in a park on a nice fall day, hand in hand with your Love, strikes me as a dream well worth dreaming.  Every life is a story, every day of a life another page.  There is chapter after chapter to the book, you live through all of them, through everything that life brings you: passion, pain, joy, boredom, wonder; the routine of daily survival, searches for answers to the questions of life, searches for Love.  To me, the couple I saw appear to be winners in the game of life; they seem to have reached the goal: a companion to share life with, and everything that it throws at you, even the failures.  Some day, I want to walk in a park in the fall, hand in hand with my Love, after many years of sharing life.  I think I would like that very much.

"It is something  -  it can be everything  -  to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on down below."

Wallace Stegner, on finding a loved one, The Spectator Bird, Doubleday, 1976

     I have to laugh, having found this quote, those of you who know me will understand the joke.  At the same time, I think  it states in more simple terms the same sentiment as the one before it:  the joy of companionship, which is the beginning of real love,  finding your Best Friend, and the pleasure of sharing life with that person.  Your best friend is the person with whom you share everything; complete Trust is the foundation of love, all that Lovers have between them is supported by it. In Trust, we surrender ourselves to our Lover, in faith that all of the fragile things will be carefully tended.

5/31/98

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