Love Me Do

The five stories and the novella in this volume are all set in the past century. It was a different time. It was a time before e-mail and personal computers. It was a time when people wrote letters on paper to each other. It was a time before cell phones, too, a time when a person needed to be in a house or office or phone booth to make a phone call. It was a time when a person traveling was incommunicado, in-between, sometimes unsure of where he or she was going or why. It was a time of social Civil Rights, women’s rights, gay rights, anti-Vietnam War protests; it was the time of the assassinations of John Kennedy and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy; it was the time of Woodstock and Altamont; it was a time when you could drink at 18 but you couldn’t vote until 21; it was a time of the draft; it was a time when almost everyone smoked cigarettes and when many smoked marijuana; it was a time of LSD and love-ins and happenings. But people were not all that different. We wanted love. We wanted security. We wanted a purpose to life and a path to reach that goal. These are talky stories, full of conversations. In my experience that’s how humans connect. We talk and we tell stories. Humans are a mouthy species, though we are not always a very articulate species. These stories don’t all have happy endings – or at least not happy endings for all the characters. Sometimes the endings seem obscure or open. Life, it seems to me, is much like that, too. Ultimately we reach, all of us, for love, and we hope it will last. It doesn’t, not always. Something in the human spirit says that love is immortal; that it can be eternal. But experience teaches us that eternity is a very iffy thing, a day-by-day proposition. Still we hope and still we hold out our arms. Two-by-two we try to make connections, try to intertwine ourselves with others who will love us as we love them (“as” meaning both at the same time and to the same degree). We learn, if we learn anything at all, that loving involves choice and courage and response. Our love is freely given, offered as a hope thrown at forever. Yet forever only lasts as long as it lasts. And if two people have some connection, some tie, some link, some twinned fate, then what it is that we call love must be a process of confronting a series of always open, infinite choices, questions following questions, to which we each keep saying yes, keep reaffirming that our love still exists, that eternity is reachable, if only (and only if) lovers reach.