There is nothing like slow dancing to old tunes to stir up romantic yearnings. You know, the “I can’t sleep for thinking about him” kind. Yes, dance to any of those old songs from decades past, and I dare you not to feel 15 or 16 once again, melting with a longing for love so powerful that palms go clammy and knees weak. Songs like At Last or Can’t Help Falling in Love can conjure up feelings you thought you put away in the closet with the rest of the high school memorabilia. Those songs and the goose bumps they cause must be part of my cellular memory I’m thinking.
Last Saturday night while attending a most wonderful birthday gala, I danced to one such song. And there they were, once again, those same dewy-eyed, dreamy feelings I had known long ago, sparked the minute the music started. As the Righteous Brothers sang out, “Baby, baby, I’d get down on my knees for you. If you would only love me like you used to do,” my dance partner commented that if this guy had to get down on his knees, it was probably too late. “It’s over,” he said. I had to stop and think about it. Who knows anymore?
I am out of practice in the romance department. Love in that particular form is a little like the foreign country I haven’t visited in a long time. I can still recall some of the sights and sounds, and I know I had a wonderful time, but it’s all a bit hazy. My dance partner continued, “You know,” he said, “a Nigerian once told me that love is a Western concept.”
Rabu would agree. He’s one of the Indian IT guys I worked with at my last job. Rabu went back home for the sole purpose of meeting and marrying the woman his parents had found for him. In two weeks, he was back at work after a huge henna-ed wedding, busy making arrangements for his new bride’s arrival in the U.S. He had only just met her, but Rabu was giddy with happiness.
No question about it, it probably pays to be practical when it comes to love. Maybe that’s how couples make it to a fifty, sixty, even a seventy-year anniversary. They learn acceptance, forgiveness, compassion – all very practical tools when sharing a bathroom with someone over a long time. They might well up at the voice of Etta James, but they certainly know that making love last is not about moonbeams and lollipops, dew drops and roses. And it’s a good thing.
No doubt I’d have been better off coming at love from a more practical point of view, a less fanciful state. Instead of always being drawn to the artist, the poet, the radical, the guy who searched, the one who struggled – perhaps I should have listened to my father. For one thing, all those years I spent worrying about paying the bills would have been completely unnecessary if I had only been a little more practical and a lot less willful.
Perhaps like Rabu, my mate should have been chosen for me. Even if the “chosen one” had been someone like Hershel Finklestein, who came complete with brains and BO, you just never know. I may have had to let go of that lovin’ feelin’, but today I might be singing a very different tune. This one, a voce alta, to Hershel, and this time, it’d be My Guy.
Sixties Chick 
June 5, 2009 at 1:38 pm |
Good one, Mayzee
June 5, 2009 at 2:03 pm |
Let’s face it…
You’re an incurable romantic…
Because you have such a big heart…
And, that’s a good thing…
June 5, 2009 at 2:09 pm |
Had to respond. ‘Love is a western concept’, I guess thats why all the art, somehow I feel they are the same.
I’ve always thought that knowing, yearning and believing in LOVE was necessary to be an artist, or at least to
appreciate and be involved in arts rewards. With a practical approach to romance do you miss the true essence of art?
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
I think Tennyson had it right. It’s complicated and frustrating but it drives so much. When I hear ‘At Last’,
I get a chill up my spine. I sing ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’ and I could cry. So many emotions come alive, I would never give that up. Once your touched by love you change forever.
Rabu will never experience that, and all the art that comes with it.
Thank you for creating.
June 5, 2009 at 2:46 pm |
There is love to be shared, and in the majority of marriages most of it is learned. I firmly believe, however, that there is a small percentage of the entire population of the world for whom true love occurs on a spiritual and cosmic level. That is the love that inspired the playwrights, the great poets and troubadours, artists of all sorts, and why we will always feel that pang in our gut when a song from those special years in our lives is heard. For anyone who has experienced it, you know the clarity it brings once you’ve realized you have been graced with it. Everyone else is simply left admiring the beauty of it, yearning for it on some level, while rationalizing that lives still need to move forward. We are human, and without love, we cannot create, and we cannot find joy. CS Lewis wrote “The Four Loves,” and I believe did a wonderful job of helping us come to terms with love in general.
June 6, 2009 at 2:33 am |
‘Practical love’ may be the choice of some,
“BUT… They never stood in the dark with YOU love.”
June 7, 2009 at 11:43 pm |
Isn’t there some saying out there that states inorder to feel real happiness, you need to have felt real sadness. To feel real joy, you need to feel real sorrow. To have felt classy, you must have had to feel very unclassy at some point in your life then too.
To feel real appreciation, you must have felt such deprivation then too……..and you must know how bad an itch is inorder to feel real relief from scratching it.
So, I thnk you need to totally hate a man inorder to know how to totally love him. I think maybe the men set up with brides hate each other because they didn’t pick each other out. For twenty years they puurfect hating each other so they really know how to love each other after five kids and baldness from wearing scarfs. They should have a hate dating network and inorder to get in, you must know how to really hate deeply……inorder to love deeply. 🙂
They might have those already called S and M sites..heh
I still say, Give Me Romance….be a Man and Give me Romance. I loved and love the Ebb Tide Song…….I use to say, ” Ebb Tide Me”..
Now I just go float on an inner tube with swimmies on my arms and get the same thrill humming it……
It’s called Romancing Myself Inside Dementia.