I Love You . . . for Seventy Mental Reasons

“I love you for sentimental reasons . . . I hope you do believe me, I’ve given you my heart ."

Throughout my childhood and teenage years, my father and I regularly danced to this song.  Not just at weddings, but veritably every weekend, when, at some point, I would put on Natalie Cole’s Unforgettable, turn it to track 11, and extend my hand to him as he sat on the couch reading.   He would spring up, give a tug on his pants at the knees, and for the next 4:30 minutes of our lives we would waltz around the living room like it was nobody’s business . . . a regular Ginger and Fred. 

We have long since stopped dancing except at the occasional wedding, yet the song remains a part of my repertoire of expressions in more ways than one.

After my daughter was born, I marveled at the tiny wonders that filled my day, my arms.  My attention was grounded in the small details of her and the environment that we moved through; the perpetual pout of her lips, the copse of veins behind her eyelids, how when she was REALLY angry, she cried without making sound for nearly 10 seconds before a shriek exploded forth.    

In these long, wonderful hours I became aware that whatever else love is — biological, chemical, sentimental — it is an active celebration of the idiosyncratic in another person, the idiosyncratic in ourselves when we are with them. 

“I love you for sentimental reasons. . .” meet “I love you for seventy mental reasons.”

In Rob Reiner's classic New York romance When Harry Met Sally, when Harry professes his love to his long time friend, he does so by way of naming her idiosyncrasies:

I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely, and it's not because it's New Year's Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

It’s a great moment in a great film . . . the boy gets the girl with whom he should have been all along . . . AND realizes at the get-go that her neuroses, fears, and habituations are not merely tolerable or endearing but part of the whole whatness of who she is. 

Carolyn Jevelian, a fellow poet whom I met and worked with last summer up in Door County, wrote a beautiful elegy to her late husband Stephen using the same technique.  She  celebrates her love by naming the exquisite beauty of his quirks:

Little Things

He took pills without water.

He ate his morning cereal with a large spoon  to save time.

He drank half coke/ half water.

He was thrilled making all the green lights on his commute.

We celebrated when the odometer turned over another hundred thousand miles.

Now there is no one to tell when I make all the green lights

or when my odometer reaches a historic number.

And now I use the big spoon.

I account it on being raised in my particular family that Carolyn's poem, as well as the film, are especially truthful expressions of love.  At a very young age I was immersed in a culture of celebrating the idiosyncratic . . . even to this day, conversations with my parents and extended family still regularly turn toward playful anecdotes that highlight the quirkiness of our personalities, our characters.  By choosing to focus on the folly, the fanciful in one another and in the most absurdly funny aspects of our relationships, it is as if to say in a resoundingly affirming way  "I see you and enjoy you just the same!"

This year, as Valentine’s Day approaches, our family is actively recording the seventy mental reasons why we love each other. 

Each night following dinner each of us takes a post-it note and writes at least one little detail about someone else in the family (or the quality of their time with someone else in the family) that they appreciate. (Mom and Dad ask three year old Pads, and record what he says. . . which is fun enough given some of his answers!)  It doesn’t matter how silly or irreverent the detail is . . . in fact, the more absurd the better.  Having written them down, we fold them up and place them in Valentines boxes we’ve decorated for ourselves.

No matter what we find when we open up those boxes on Valentines day, the outcome of our reflection will be two-fold with each person having been given not one, but two invaluable gifts:  a testimonial of seventy strange or not so strange reasons why we are loved, as well as a stronger attention to the ways in which each others' presence have been mapped through our lives.

  

Listening With The Body

“Moffsen, Mama? Blewstreen blang comar?”

With her consummately tiny voice, Miss S. spent hours practicing the art of conversation . . . long before she had a comprehensible vocabulary.   At the age of two she could sit on a park bench at the playground for hours, forgoing the jungle gym in order to talk to me in this otherworldly pre-language.  As she squared her frame toward my body and leaned in to our summer confidence, I found it uncanny the way she held me in full regard, intonating her statements with such perfectly cued facial expressions and body language.  At times I believed I just was not hearing her right . . . that surely there were discernable words in her speech. 

Listening eagerly, I leaned in with attentive silence; through body and voice, each of us offered up our speech with as much joy as if we had been speaking the same language.

As we took a bike ride today I was reminded of these early confidences we had, of how they have become more rich with time.  On topics ranging from the prevention of cancer, to a silly thing one of her peers said at school, to a memory of the mosquitoes she encountered on a trip to India, to the plot of her friends’ current school-yard game, the trip around the neighborhood was laced with an unending string of her anecdotes, queries, memories, concerns, to which I listened attentively, but offered little.

“I’m so joyful right now,” she said with a small sigh, walking her bike as we neared the house. 

“I know,” I replied, smiling. 

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Because I am listening to you with my whole body.”

Listening with the body.  In one of the most beautiful passages in Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, the geisha Sayuri speaks of the love and attentiveness involved in this process:

Usually when he first came, the Chairman talked for a time about his workday.  He might tell me about troubles with a new product, or about a  traffic accident involving a truckload of parts, or some such thing.  Of course I  was happy to listen, but I understood perfectly well that the Chairman wasn’t telling these things to me because he wanted me to know them.  He was clearing them from his mind, just like draining water from a bucket.  So I listened closely not to his words, but to the tone of his voice; because in the same way that sound rises as a bucket is emptied, I could hear the Chairman’s voice softening as he spoke.  (422)

Sometimes listening with the body requires a silent attentiveness; sometimes it requires questioning; sometimes it requires affirmation; in all cases it requires an utter and complete attention to the other, a practice that Mikhail Bakhtin identifies as love.  

There are people with whom I cultivated such a listening, people with whom the space of conversation habitually opened up into moments of deep recognition; yet even the most spiritual of these were not immutable against the forces of death and busyness, a misplaced desire to protect, distractions, the loss of trust.  

Over time, I forgot the value of nurturing my own capacity to listen with the body, to foster it in my most valued relationships.  My children, with their need to be seen and fully recognized, have reminded me to my better self.

After spending what seems like an eon in the fluorescent purgatory of the quasi-competent, I have spent the past two years slowly relearning the art of loving conversation so as to listen to my children with my whole body, being present to them in what they say and what they do not say, and honoring a space for dialogue each and every day, no matter whether that dialogue is spoken or silent. .  . 

It’s a process that works best, as one could anticipate, when we are alone. . . which is why I am rather glad the holidays are over.  It seems strange to say that the time I spend with my kids is more rich and meaningful when their school term is in session, but those three hours we have alone together after full days apart are pure gold.