Love springs even in the winter of life
he warmth of love surprises by blossoming even in the chill winter of our lives. I’m 77, she’s 74. Love crept up on us not long after we met. And since then, I’ve learned something: Depth of feeling has no age limit, even when the body creaks, joints pop, meds and vitamin supplements are essential in the daily diet, and wrinkles define.
But how can that be, after clawing through decades of hopes and despair, of ignorance and enlightenment, of love and divorce? How do you know you’re in love (certainly a catchall word) — that it’s not just infatuation — at a time of life when you can’t remember why you walked into another room to retrieve something? Does labeling feelings matter?
“How do I love thee?” Elizabeth Barrett Browning asks in her Sonnet 43. “Let me count the ways.” Fortunately, she didn’t count too high; she does it in only 13 lines.
Relationships can be quieter in one’s 70s. No wild parties until 2 a.m.; no binge drinking; no experimenting with hallucinatory drugs; no sudden, incandescent tearing off of clothes. Passion may be an affair of the heart, but there’s also frailty of the heart as a vital organ to consider.
Love at this age doesn’t mean marriage. Been there, done that. Love just means being together, sharing heart, mind, body,
Tspirit and soul on a foundation of trust and openness. We tell each other, laughing in disbelief, that we’re acting like teenagers. We love the idea of it. Makes us feel young.
As teens, love perhaps was best expressed in the songs of the 1950s, when aching hearts pined for each other with such fervor that the pull of being together was a do or die proposition. Every couple had “their” song.
Dion and The Belmonts in their 1959 release of “A Teenager in Love” expressed angst and frustration in the lyrics: “One day I feel so happy, next day I feel so sad/I guess I'll learn to take the good with the bad/Cause each night I ask the stars up above/Why must I be a teenager in love?”
I recently listened again — bless you, YouTube — to Johnny Mathis singing “The Twelfth of Never,” the flip side of his “Chances Are” 1957 hit.
It’s a song of lilting beauty whose lyrics are as surreal as the time frame of the title, of love so eternal that it would last “’til the bluebells forget to bloom” and “’til the poets run out of rhyme.” Silly, huh? But perfect if you’re surfing on the soaring tide of teen love, dancing close, eyes wide shut.
His love for his girl won’t end, the song concludes, “Until the twelfth of never, and that’s a long, long time.” Sure is.
Maybe the impossible scenarios painted by these lofty lyrics are merely a metaphor for the rarity of true love.
Time. In older age, the perceived compression of time — days zoom by — may be the cloudy side of love. You wish you had met before midlife.
The twelfth of never takes on a different meaning at a riper age, when the horizon is visible, when there is a looming yet indefinable deadline. Forever —the twelfth of never — could come tomorrow. So you learn to live for today.
I’m not a Buddhist, but Zen Buddhism makes a plea worth noting:
“It tries to have you understand, without arguing the point, that there is no purpose in getting anywhere if, when you get there, all you do is think about getting to some other future moment,” said The Guardian newspaper in its Sept. 21, 2012, edition in an article about Zen Buddhism. “Life exists in the present, or nowhere at all, and if you cannot grasp that, you are simply living a fantasy.”
This probably dismisses the Western concept of time, but it surely helps when applied to unleashing the heart toward another at an age when the conscious reality is of loved ones and friends dying of illnesses or just expiring, when the twelfth of never arrives for them.
It would be tragic to miss the rare magnificence of deeply heartfelt emotion and the enthusiasm for life that it engenders by focusing on a future that doesn’t exist. Live — and love — for now.