Happy Valentine's Day: Love Stinks

²¹"I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies."

Amos 5:21, Old Testament of the Bible

    The God of the Old Testament apparently found Israel's professed love for Him, ostensibly demonstrated alternately through partying and piety, to smell like rotting flesh in the summer sun.  Several millennium later, the J. Geils Band may have stumbled upon more truth than humor in the these A.D. 1980 lyrics from a song and album titled "Love Stinks":

You love her
But she loves him
And he loves somebody else
You just can't win
And so it goes
Till the day you die
This thing they call love
It's gonna make you cry
I've had the blues
The reds and the pinks
One thing for sure
(Love stinks)
Love stinks yeah yeah 

     I'm gonna get right to the point this Valentine's Day.  I'm not preaching, I'm passing on a lesson I've learned the hard way, from my mistakes.  I can chase that feeling of lovestruck euphoria until I fall asleep for the last time and I'll never get anywhere near love.  I may get lust, infatuation, obsession, or worse, I may get a lot of people to cosign my bullshit and tell me how well I've chosen.  But I won't get love.

     I'll find love when I make a decision to love another person and follow through with loving actions.  Patience, tolerance, and kindness seem like good places to start.

     Looking for that special someone who thinks like me, someone I connect with, someone with whom I have chemistry, turned out, for me, to be Grade A baloney.           
     Years of sunrises and sunsets, filled with countless opportunities to love, were lost on me.  I would not have, maybe I could not have, recognized love had it fallen on top of me.  The result was a profound disappointment, the disappointment that only unmet expectations can engender.      
     I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point after my fourth decade on this little blue planet I made a conscious decision to let go of my expectations and begin to accept the ones I'd been given to love without any conditions, people I didn't choose in the first place - my mother and father, my sister, then outward in concentric circles... my extended family, my neighbors, coworkers, those who share my city, my state, my country, the world.  Learning involves a daily decision to love through loving thoughts, words, and actions.
     All of my best ideas about how to "get" love proved futile, for just that reason.  I was giving to get.  I still do that sometimes, and guess what?
     No love, just stink.

Happy Valentine's Day

             

I'll Get You, Buck

     One of my favorite memories from 2010 was a Thanksgiving morning brunch at my eldest daughter's home.  There were about eight of us: the food was good, the atmosphere was small and quiet, and the conversation was pleasant.
     After dinner, we stepped out onto the raised wooden front porch of their 1911 home in central Phoenix to enjoy the perfect Fall weather and bright sunshine.  Suddenly we heard a panicky male voice with an east coast accent imploring someone to call the police because he was being attacked.
     The voice belonged to a large, balding man in his 40's.  He was wearing sunglasses with bright white frames, a red polo-type shirt with white pinstripes, and khaki pants held together at the waste by his belt, as the button and zipper had long since broken.  In one hand he carried a rolled-up newspaper and a roll of toilet paper.  In the other he carried a handkerchief with which he kept mopping his sweating forehead, while looking behind him.
     Soon we met the source of the man's angst.  Another man, perhaps a bit younger and definitely a bit dirtier, rode by on a bicycle with those big "ape hanger" type handlebars and sneered, "I'll get you, Buck!" as he cleared his throat and spat in the direction of our hapless new friend in the day-glow sunglasses.
     The man on the bicycle made a quick U-turn after spitting and rode off in the direction from which he came.  The sunglasses man stood bewildered in front of my daughter's home and repeated his request that someone call the cops.  He said he'd been harassed by Bicycle Man for a few years now, that he'd gone to the homeless shelter for the annual Thanksgiving meal and that somehow Bicycle Man was able to spot him out of a crowd of several hundred people and began threatening him.
     My son in law did call the cops, mostly to placate Sunglasses Man, and handed him the phone.  You could tell by his end of the conversation that the police dispatcher was none too excited about sending officers out to investigate the complaint of a "crime" that was now past tense.
     A few weeks later I saw Sunglasses man several miles from my daughter's home in a different part of Phoenix.  
     He wasn't hard to spot.