The Notebook, or Love Actually?

Wow! How sad is it that you have to re-read your last few posts to remember when and what you wrote?! Anyhow, I must begin a new semester – for all of those post-graduates, stop looking so smug! – with a new topic, perhaps even a series!  So, to all of my nonexistant readers, you may look forward to (or look away, your choice) being sweapt up in one of the most passionate, daring, heart-wrenching, romantic, and inspiring love stories you have yet encountered! And it is a true story ( this is a blog, people), one I am very closely connected to and am privileged to recount.  “Your own?” the curious reader may inquire. Not hardly.

Since this is being written among the frantic exams, furious term papers and phantasmagorical reading lists, I don’t feel it fair to promise that I will supply daily posts – I am still, after all a starving, hysterically stressed and poorrather taxed college student.  So, I will attempt to be as consistent as I can in my impoverished busy state and submit one new installment each week, probably on Fridays – or possibly Saturday, sometime, or even on some late Sunday evenings.  If you still doubt me, I will note it on the Manuscript of Ever Changing Facial Expressions (FB), so that I am held accountable and not leave my readers hanging!

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I sat on edge of the faded blue armchair, just to the left of the squeaky spring, looking over jovial faces of a young couple, their two round babies and various scrawny pets. The smiles, once radiant, leaned out sweetly from yellowed pages in a captive moment. Loretta touched her glasses and smiled down on them, waving a soft hand lovingly over the pages, “This was in our first home on Magnolia.” Her smile reflected the one in black and white, only deepened by decades of use. “Look how skinny I was there, and Daddy too!” she laughed and we shook our heads over shared patterns of the feminine physique and its uncontrollable predictability. The laughter faded and she looked steadily at a tall, lank figure in army uniform. “My, but he was a fine man,” she said softly, and brushed a fresh tear from her cheek. “All my life, my ninety-one years, I have never met a man like him! I prayed and prayed when I was young for a good man, a hard-working, loving, Christian man, like my own father. And I waited, whooee!” she warbled, laying her head back, laughing and rocking in her tilt-back chair. “I waited a long time! So long I thought that I must have missed him! But then God brought my Bill, and he was everything I could have hoped for.” Loretta fingered her engagement ring, now worn thin with more than half a century of cleaning, cooking, and service. She sighed, and smiling, told me that they would have celebrated their 64th wedding anniversary in a few weeks, had he lived.

I had to sit back to take in the presence of the emotion that hung around her. There she was, 91 years old and as full of love and devotion for this man as if they had jus returned from their honeymoon. It was incredible to see such warmth and gratitude for a covenant relationship that lasted a short 18 years, and to experience the steel of their committment all these years later. I was humbled by her respect and reverence to an institution we presently seem to shrug off at an alarming rate as “old-fashioned.”  Perhaps it was this “old-fashioned” attitude that kept this beautiful, capable woman, my grandmother, in love with one man for 47 years after his death. Where can I find passionate committment like that today?

But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself.