I am continuing my topic from last week. What is love? Even our beloved pets (for me its Bear dog) have love and give it and receive it.
Again, one thing I know is that love lasts forever. One of the most extraordinary loves of my life started in high school with a girl that became my soul mate. We petted and passionately kissed but were never intimate, just talked and explored thoughts of “what If and why is this” and confided our deepest thoughts, never really thought about marriage, and didn’t even “go steady” as it was called back then.
She moved away, kept in touch, and occasionally when I would go up to upstate New York to visit my daughter, I would stop by and see her and spend maybe a day. The last time she was battling some health problems. She confided in me that her heart was broken when I was married to my first wife. I never knew that until that moment. After all those years, a divorce on her end and two on my end that she wanted us to be more. In my opinion, though, I’ll never know for sure, but God either wasn’t listened to or had other plans. We both turned to God through Jesus as life went on, we would occasionally write and chat (with incredible faith an understanding, and trust from my current wife of 22 years). Then years ago, I lost touch with her. We both had a habit of no matter where we were, be it alone or together, we would gaze up at full moons and somehow or another feel the special closeness that was unique to us like kindred spirits. After losing track of her a few years back, I felt a loss; maybe she decided to move on, or maybe she passed away and didn’t say goodbye.
As things go, I was recently a part of a Facebook page on my old high school and history of Melbourne and connected with two cousins of my soulmate, and they let me know she passed away a few years ago when I lost contact. I thanked them for letting me grieve and have closure to a remarkable stretch in my life’s journey. Love lasts into eternity.
My first love, however, was in the 5th grade. Her name was Miko, and she was an adopted Japanese girl by Military parents stationed there after the war. We were bound by love, true love as in the innocence and honesty of children. To illustrate, we would walk from school on Friday afternoons me to my sister’s house (my mom would go grocery shopping on Friday, and I would meet her at my sister’s house near the elementary school.) We would hold hands, juggling our books in the other hand. After elementary school, One Friday in November, tragedy struck as we were all instructed to gather in our homeroom to watch a tearful Walter Cronkite say that President Kennedy had been shot. I walked her home while she sobbed, and I was at her side when she needed a true friend who could be strong and by her side. Miko moved away because her dad was transferred to the Florida panhandle. We wrote to each other for a couple of years, and as time went on and we grew up and apart.
Fast forward to 1990. I’m the president of the Florida Jaycees, and I was speaking at a membership drive meeting at the Panama City Jaycees. I noticed a striking, attractive Asian lady in the audience, making occasional eye contact with me. On a break, she walked over to me and said, “Do you remember me?; you would know me as Miko. I’ve been a Jaycee for a while and have been inactive for a few years with marriage and kids demanding my time. I saw a newsletter and saw your name, and I had to come to the meeting.” I was floored, we hugged, and memories flooded back of a simpler time. We said that we would keep in touch, we never did, but love is eternal, without physical proximity.
Mitzi, I met at a band camp at UF when I was a rising junior in high school. She lived in St Augustine and I in Melbourne. We became close, and as per my custom, I was a pretty good kisser. We were a
long-distance couple writing and commuting. We really had fun being together, and yes, love settled in again between two young souls. We even went to each other’s proms all on the same weekend, hers on Friday night and mine on Saturday. This arrangement went on for about a year, and after graduation, we became “promised” to each other (a kind of 1st step toward engagement). One night as heavy petting turns into more, we lost our virginity. Not a glamorous moment, but memorable just the same. But that changed everything; what was once innocent became different. Secrets that were meant to be discovered after marriage were known too soon, and we lost the moment. The kind of love we had for each other had changed from exiting innocence to something else. She went off to college, and I met my first wife, and we drifted apart and just gracefully said goodbye. To this day, I don’t know whatever became of her, but once again, love visited and was shared, and then like a small pretty flower, we just let it slip out of our hands and on to the grass to wither and die only to spring up again with someone new.
Now, after you have tediously waded through my rather mundane love life, I model myself as a tiny archetypal version of King Solomon, son of King David. The similarities are that he had a successful dad who was “A man after God’s Own Heart” who won victories and accumulated wealth to pass on to be managed by his son to build a great temple. The son Solomon was a builder and person of great wisdom, and the greatest of this wisdom was to ask God for the discernment between right and wrong.
He did a great job on the temple building, being a shrewd businessman and a leader. He also had large concubines of women and around 200 wives. He wrote many wise things and the rather racy Song of Songs, also known as the Song of Solomon, which details intimacy that makes many blush. Even though he is in the lineage of Jesus, at times, he was a little less than a saint. Like me, God was laying out the righteous path (lay off all the women, deal justly with your workforce, don’t rip off your father’s friend Hiram, don’t tax everyone to death, build my temple to the exact specifications I have given you) he did all the stuff in parentheses above and then some. He did great and wonderful things and is utterly flawed, but he is my hero of the Old Testament because I can relate. However, all his stuff makes my stuff look pretty small, especially the women stuff; I couldn’t even handle a few, let alone a few hundred. On a much, much, much, smaller scale, I’m that guy as a character. The one thing that touches this topic is that Solomon had many women around him, but he loved only a 100 or so. Well, I had only maybe five and I married 3 of them and finally settled on one. I loved these all, and a few more I dated, so I’m not exactly a lover of biblical proportions.
What is Love? God is Love.
Tales from Depression and Dealing with it. 