(Jennilyn and I a few days before winter semester 1986 ended)Do kids these days understand how easy it is to stay in touch? Do they understand why that very easiness makes it perplexing that they don’t stay in touch?
Spring and Summer of 1986 I wrote letters to Jennilyn. With a pen, on paper! Sometimes, the paper I wrote on would be found paper, whatever I could get my hands on the moment I felt the need to write. I made tapes for her; actual, physical recordings on a tape recorder, cassette tapes that I then mailed to her. Used stamps, on envelopes. I learned how many sheets of paper were in an ounce (because anything more required a second stamp).
I made long distance phone calls! I had to budget my time just so, in order to get the weekend and night-time rate!
With my friends’ help, I orchestrated amusing tableaus, then took pictures, developed the film, and mailed the photos!
It amuses me now to remember what that entailed. Nothing was instant, except for the occasional (watched-for, scheduled, and closely timed) phone calls. Conversations by letter were distant, stilted, romantic staged things. Imagine talking to someone where you have to speak in complete paragraphs, but then have to wait a week to hear the response.
Knowing what I know now, this was all just a type of things to come; trans-oceanic written communication turns days into weeks for the turn around. I wonder what it was like when everything took months, seasons, to travel from place to place.
Ah, long-distance love.
It established a pattern I still see present in my approach to my daily occurrence; whenever something interesting happened, I looked forward to sharing it with Jennilyn.
Do you find yourself wondering how something is going to look on facebook, or how it can fit into a blog-post? Yeah, like that, except with just one person. Jennibook!
Somewhere in the talking, the writing, the picture-taking and the cassette-making, a plan formed. Jennilyn would be coming to the East Coast to see me! Well, sort of. She had an Aunt in McClean, Virginia that she could ostensibly be traveling to see. If things went completely awry, that was kind of the back up plan.
When is it appropriate to meet the parents? When is it appropriate to fly across the entire country and spend a week with your boyfriend’s family?
The Summer of 1986, I wasn’t thinking about appropriate, I just wanted Jenni to come and see me. But that’s not all I wanted. I realize now that I was also desperate for her to get to know more about me. In the few weeks before the semester had ended, I met her parents, her siblings, a few of her cousins.
I liked meeting them, it meant I knew more about her.
I wanted her to meet my people. Probably to show off, I guess. Both to demonstrate to “my people” what an amazing girl she was, but to also share my life with her.
Love isn’t just a whiling away of time in the company of someone you enjoy, not in my opinion; that whiling away isn’t love, it’s just … playtime. I know, that makes me sound like an old cranky man. As I have grown older, I have tired of selfishness. Tired of juvenilia. I often feel the weight of my responsibilities, the burden of providing for many mouths, many lives. My children tease me when I forget things, and I have more than once grumbled about them keeping track of their one schedule of tasks, while I (try!) to keep track of a dozen.
I want my kids to be happy. I want everybody to be happy. I really believe that being exclusively focused on your own happiness doesn’t result in actual happiness. The selfish wringing of self-satisfaction out of every moment makes your world so small. It turns your focus too myopically to your “now”, and you lose any hope of willfully directing your “someday”.
Loving Jennilyn that summer made my world larger. It gave me a vision of a future where we could be together, I could make her happy, and together we could do things.
Love does things. It’s an effort, an urge to serve, to build. To work.
I loved her, yes. But she was also *good* for me. She made me better, demanded work and humility and sacrifice from herself, and I felt compelled to be better because of her, to deserve her.
That has never changed.
Previously, on Every Epic Love Story; chapter 7.
Next chapter, the (dramatic chord!) chapter 9, the visit East!.
