I knew it was love when...

It’s easy for me to get sentimentally attached to other people’s pasts, to the history and heartache of another era, to stories that aren’t my own. The frayed edges of a black and white photograph communicate a romance that I almost always fail to find in the technicolor dullness of my real, everyday life. Errands hide it, pauses hide it, confusion hides it, apathy hides it, so that, when all is said and done, it is very difficult to detect the elements of enchantment that a stranger might easily uncover decades from now, beneath a dusty sea of yesterdays. 

My grandmother is an exceptionally romantic woman. I don’t mean by this word to imply that she smolders in the night and hovers in the day, with orchid posture, a siren voice, and the ancient primal warmth of a thousand muse-worthy smiles. She’s no Vivian Leigh, no Ingrid Bergman, women whose mouths, it seems to me, were molded purely to tremble and be smashed passionately against some harder and listlessly unreachable jaws. She is no Beatrice. Her romance is not aloof, but profoundly approachable. Her melancholy might orbit events which transpired at the supermarket, the trials of a beloved mailman, the fugitive health of a neighbor, or of a television personality. She finds, in the visiting geese and the freshly sprouted azaleas and black eyed suzan’s, real triumph and charm. 

Like so many things which are undeniably beautiful, her romance drives me, occasionally, to despair. I’m not proud of this quality, but it can’t be helped. I wouldn’t precisely call it jealousy, it’s just that the stories that other people tell, about their vacations, funerals, love affairs, always feel more comprehensive to me than the life I am living. Stories, after all, have beginnings, middles and ends. Stories teach us lessons. My life, in contrast, seems to happen in fits and starts, peppered with pathetic, hard won maxims: “Don’t sleep with anyone on the first date.” “Eat breakfast.” “Why do you love me? is a question that quickly becomes a habit.” “Fad diets are more fun to think about than to be on.” What beginning, middle and end is there in all that? And I know my grandmother, primarily, through her stories, and the stories I have heard about her. My fingers fumble lead like through years of photographs, photocopied journal entries, newspaper clippings. Her voice, honest, sings without affectations ballads of the many people she has known and loved. Known and loved, it seems to me, in ways I cannot imagine knowing or loving anyone. 

Here is a story that I know very well. Joan met John at the Campana Factory in Batavia Illinois. My grandmother, freshly released from high school, bobbed brunette hair, “secured a job at the place right out of the shoot.” She says that it was her typing and dictation skills that set her apart from her class mates, but I am sure that her natural wit and warmth were no small help. She loved her job. I can see, in shades of grey that over the years have turned to a light brown, her dressed in a tea length, pencil skirt. Pressed, impressed, eager. The friendly clack and shuffle of a young woman eager to be useful, noticed, grown. She was lovely, doe eyed, serene. At least, this is what I see in the pictures. I myself have never been a creature of serenity. All of my innocence has been experienced by me as a gawky, groping and stumbling. Perhaps we can only find naivety beautiful in other people. It takes on a sheen in them that the natural discomfort of the state denies to its possessor. 

The story of my grandparents is not totally different from a thousand other love stories of their time. John, my grandfather, and his good friend happened to be driving by Campana. They happened to pull over. My grandfather happened to need a job. He happened to work in the candy department, assembling weight loss caramels popular at the time, and my grandmother’s desk happened to be stationed near the entrance to the cafeteria. Glances were exchanged, words tossed back and forth, carelessly, breathlessly, at a water fountain which my grandmother had walked over to not because she was thirsty but because it was next to the elevator that he took. A million and one chance beginnings, and three months later they were married. 

On their first date my grandmother wore a mouton lamb coat. She borrowed it from her boss. When she tells this story, she always includes the detail of the coat, and how it made her look puffy and not unlike a petite bear, standing next to John whose length was only accentuated by her smallness. In her telling the coat is a humorous detail, worn at the insistence of her employer for the sake of creating a sophisticated facade. Fur to a football game; how posh! And yet I cannot help but imagine how the snow, as it fell across her shoulders, as it buried itself in her dark hair, as it coaxed the pink in her cheeks to rise and blossom, must have created a bewitching topography of dark and light, and how impossible it would have been for my grandfather, with his unmatched romantic sensibility, to avoid falling in love with her. 

The sunrise of these recollections in my heart transports me; everything which is erotic in us, trusting in us, all that does the falling part when we fall in love, is ignited in me when I recall these moments. But then, of course, it is not a memory really, or at least not my memory. It’s only a story; a vivid imagining of a timeless courtship. There is an inevitable sunset which follows the brief illumination of these visions, but it is a sunset which contains me. On my better days, I can find a certain solace in the beauty of that precious and ephemeral light, which dies its thoughtlessly colorful death all around me. Perhaps, I think, there is some hope for love in the dark.