Love and Oldies

Oldies music reminds me of my first true love.

My first love is also my latest love: Matthew.

We used to listen to "oldies" all the time while dating: The Guess Who, Three Dog Night, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Mamas and the Papas, Chicago, Elvis. The oldies are even older now these more than 15 years later.

I used to sing These Eyes to him in his car or room after we got together...perhaps not the most appropriate song for a budding relationship...and he used to sing The Glory of Love to me over the phone as we managed being more than a thousand miles apart.

Maybe I find myself frequently listening to oldies again because summer is approaching, and that season most of all embodies the tone of music from a bygone, seemingly more carefree age. I associate it with our June wedding and our first months of marriage. But all this nostalgia with its back beats, harmonies, peppy tempos and teenage love homages has me thinking not just about the beginnings of love but about its evolution.

The honeymoon is never over, I believe. Rather, it's seasonal, too - a surprise vacation from the mundane, but one very hard to conjure or manipulate to your desired schedule. When it shows up fickle paradise must be recognized and embraced, clung to. You have to abandon all your hang ups and relinquish them to joy.

This bliss can be recaptured for a few moments when you spy your spouse being adorable, looking cute in his new Adidas soccer gear or realize anew that his smile as it ignites his large eyes is truly winning; it won you. Sometimes if you're lucky it shows up on your anniversary over a bottle of fine champagne. It can even show up when the kids are around, playful but skittish.

Fear never leaves love completely. It sneaks around at its vulnerable borders, a mischievous stalker ready to throw cold water over any situation. It will ruin these little returns of paradise, steal them away greedily, and chip away at trust. Fear would like you to keep your protective distance from your spouse, terrified of being hurt or lied to someday, scared stiff by stories of betrayal from friends and associates. It paints with messy, garish and broad strokes to highlight every imperfection, change and unknown variable as the years progress, as love progresses.

What, after all, is this mature love they speak of?

Sometimes you think Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' song If You Don't Know Me By Now is the most appropriate theme for your 15th anniversary... or 10th...or 20th.

Yet true love is still worth the risk and occasional heartache and irrationality. These eyes of mine still see my man and love him.

All this oldies music for me recalls an era of first dates, first kisses, first sparks, the first time we held hands while on the way to gamble at a horse racing track, and that's a bit of honeymoon recaptured.

That's the glory of love.

Know Thyself

I don't know myself at all. Not one bit. Could somebody introduce us? I'm so elusive, so capricious.

This is a cruel discovery to be made in the middle of my life. I wish I had known it from the beginning. Not sure what I would have done with that knowledge....can be so indecisive.

It took all my precious children abandoning the home front for school and bigger adventures to wake me up in order to recognize the stranger in the mirror.

How do I not know myself? Let me count the ways.

1. I thought I wanted an immaculate house.

HA!

Turns out, no. No, I don't. Not nearly bad enough, anyway. I have more time now to pursue and maintain a well-organized and spotless home, but cleaning a house isn't fulfilling in the least. It doesn't bring joy, and, trust me, it never stays that way.

Don't get me wrong. I work hard around here. I do most of the menial jobs including taking out trash, but as my son Berto told me not long ago, "Get a life, Mom." He meant it kindly, but he most certainly did not mean that I should clean more. He was encouraging me to pursue other things entirely, because it already seems to my kids that all I do is clean, clear out and straighten up.

2. I thought I wanted peace and quiet.

Somebody rescue me....from ME!

Turns out that peace and quiet are unsuitable companions if one has a rebellious, disgruntled mind well-endowed with imagination. Peace has left the building. Quiet is a vicious, gnawing rat.

3. I thought I wanted to write a lot more.

Guess what? Shhhhhh. Come closer. Writing is work, too. And it requires you to wear your happy, industrious pants. Well, I blame peace and quiet for stealing my happy pants, so I was too petulant to write much. I barely wrote more this year at all when I think of all the opportunities I should have had if not for my bad temper.

Writing - writing anything as well as I can - gives me a high not unlike a mother feels after giving birth naturally. If I could have just pushed through, ordered my bad moods out of the way, I would have felt much better most of the time.

Will and I need to have a talk about teamwork.

But, hey, I'm writing now.

4. I thought all I wanted to do was stay home.

I have always been a homebody. I remember my sister Vinca visiting me just after I had my oldest daughter Ana. We only had one vehicle then, and if I didn't walk someplace pushing babies in a double stroller, home was sweet. Vinca asked me how I could stand it, but I had never minded.

Even while growing up, my older siblings were out working in the woods with my parents rolling grapevine wreaths, and I was home cleaning. Of course, home back then was on 98 acres of green, rolling land with woods and a creek, so it was greatly prized and smelled like honeysuckle and rich earth.

Home now is a great little place in the city with a fair backyard in which my family plays baseball and soccer games on weekends, but it is not enough anymore when my husband and children are away so much.

I am craving adventure for myself or at least new friends and more exercise. I feel left behind in a special cocoon I have made, and I want to struggle out of it. That means I have to abandon the fear that I will be spending too much money, time, or pleasure on myself. I have to convince myself that I am worth it.

But am I? Yes? Shesh, I sound like such a baby, already so blessed! Perhaps I'll just go and watch It's A Wonderful Life again.

5. I thought I wanted to pluck my eyebrows and dye my hair.

Okay, this one is trivial, but it shows I don't know my own mind even where it comes to my appearance.

I began to "shape" the eyebrows  when I was thirty-five. Now, I'm approaching thirty-seven, and I don't want to anymore. My eyebrows are somewhat unruly, artfully imperfect, but I have decided that each hair is precious. And anyhow, I hate false eyelashes and fake nails, have never yet dyed my hair - though I was tempted not long ago to abandon my lovely chestnut color to go blonde - so why train naturally errant brows?

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My children have just two weeks left of school, and now that I have finally realized how aloof I am, I have so little time to try and forge an acquaintance with me. Perhaps I should make a bucket list of sorts: 10 team-building activities Hillary wants to do with herself before her children get out of school. There's still time for adventure surely.

Next year, believe me, I am going to have a game plan. I'm not going to enter into blind solitude again. I'm going to learn to flamenco dance or take guitar lessons so I can play in local coffee shops. I'm going to get involved with some creative group of people, find my fellow crazies.

And I am - I truly am - going to write a lot more. This I know for sure about myself: it would do my heart good.

Berto, soccer star and writer

I have felt sad now for a while and for many different reasons, some profound and some illusory.

Yes, I know that's a brilliant beginning.

At any rate last week was a rough week and so I didn't write one bit. A successful writer once said that a writer can't help but write - especially when depressed. But I find that is not so with me. I avoid it, in a slump. Perhaps the fact that I didn't have a play date with words made me sadder than I had to be, though. I think it very probable.

The definite highlight of that week was an evening spent with my son Berto, watching his school soccer game during which he scored his first goal of the season with an assist from his friend Danny. Danny was taking a penalty shot, and Berto saw an opportunity and begged, whispering and gesturing, for Danny to pass it back to him. Being a good friend and teammate, Danny did, and Berto made a beautiful shot high in the goal over the wall of opposing players.

We went out to dinner afterwards, just my son and I. Of course, it was semi-fast food, but what a treat for us to spend an evening together.

Then I had the honor of taking him to an awards ceremony for narrative, poetry and essay writing in his school district. Berto won first prize for essay in 7th grade. I was so thrilled to see his name on the first line in the program that I kept grinning and embracing him until he whispered, "Mom, I have friends here."

When he was called up to receive his ribbon, certificate, and the commemorative anthology of featured writing, I could have kicked myself for forgetting to bring a camera. (Only for the thousandth time in my life, such is my technology handicap and prejudice that I cannot even recall it's there for my use!) I hadn't even thought to ask for his Dad's smartphone, so like an un-evolved ape, I held up my son's simple phone but couldn't figure out how to snap a shot, and so had to nod my head stupidly to imply I captured the moment when in fact I caught it with nothing but my poor faulty eyes and brain. Only later did Berto explain that his basic phone was not a touchscreen.

We were going to sneak out after the essay portion since it was a school night, but I decided against it and explained to Berto that I thought we should stay to support and applaud all the writers. It gave me a thrill to see these young writers walk across the stage, to see the expression of their different personalities - some in heels with coiffed hair, some in bow ties and dress slacks, some still supporting the grunge scene, it seemed - and to hear their different writing voices.

The parents were asked to stand up at the end, so that their support and nurturing of these young creative people could be recognized. I shook my fists in the air like a prize fighter until Berto knocked them down. But, hey, even in his Mother's Day card he recognized me as his editor.