Given the date, how about a love letter?

We don’t write love letters much because we’re out of the habit of letter-writing and they’re hard to compose without embarrassment. Greeting cards and emojis have platitudinized an emotion which has its distinct and distinctive coloration. Most lovers agree with the lovebirds in Guys and Dolls,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedNo two people have ever been so in love,As my lovey-dove and I,

but how to say so without getting mushy or cloddish with cliches?

Since words are pretty much all I make (except mistakes), why not dust off the old form and see how it goes?

Jane brought me to life. She’s my heart’s Jesus.

Growing up I never knew love. My parents never showed it – to each other or their kids. Propriety and duty were our lodestars. To show emotion was a failure of reserve. I’ve no idea what they thought about each other, though I observed them together for sixteen years. I’ve no idea what they thought about me.

To my first wife, I was a disappointment. We often had fun together, especially on a tennis court, but she wanted me to be someone I wasn’t and I could never fit her procrustean prescription. She was a remarkable talent and unrivaled mom but we never fit – for thirty years – which grated on both. Were she alive we might laugh about it together – we were good at laughing together – but what remains is puzzlement at my failure to endear.

I loved – how I love – my kids – but that’s a different sort of love – pre-existing, if you don’t break it. Romantic love feels won.

I fell in love with Jane like a plugged bird – Romeo fashion – though past fifty. Boing, and that was that. Jane, newly widowed after a long loving marriage, was less smitten. Why get married, she kept asking, can’t we just be partners? My brooding insecurity was having none of that. Either you want to marry me or you don’t, I explained, and if you don’t, I know where I stand. She decided eventually in favor, to my infinite relief and to her, I believe, satisfaction. That was eighteen joyful years ago.

If you know Jane, my infatuation doesn’t surprise you. Beautiful, smart, gracious, kind, prodigiously talented, endlessly curious, she put up with me, which isn’t always easy, for I can be cranky, solitudinous, grim. A pellucid writer, she’s also an unrivaled editor, making my words better. When she’s absent, I miss her. Among the manifold gifts of retirement is we’re seldom apart.

If I sound uxorious, so I am, but fanatics are often recent converts and I’m a newcomer to uxory. Jane’s the luck of my life. I still pinch myself, incredulous.

To arrive at affirmation after desolation makes my trek feel triumphant, notwithstanding its inevitable bumps and bouts. I sometimes think I invented God to have someone to thank. Yes, our world is falling apart, but my world is wholesome and whole. I envy my best pal Stone Roberts’ ability to make his wife gorgeous (as she is) in many paintings. (Check out the Figures and Interiors section in this hyperlink – but come back – for my peroration!)

Words, when it comes to connubial love, have two left feet, but George Eliot managed it. “What greater thing is there for two human souls,” she wrote, “than to feel joined for life – to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?”

Amen.