So I always tell him that his date was really a seeing eye date.
Anyway, so she sets us up and I reluctantly agree to have him call me. Before he does, I ask Lauren the pertinent questions.
Me: How old is he?
Lauren: Um, he’s done with college…twenty-three, maybe? (note: I am twenty-six at the time and certainly don’t want anyone younger. I hold the phone tightly and pretend it is said eighth grader’s neck. At the time, I am currently going for my degree to teach middle school monsters and I begin to rethink this.)
Me: Ah, how tall is he?
Lauren: He’s average height for his age.
Me: What does that mean? Where does he live?
Lauren: Around here somewhere.
I give up at this point. Agree to the date and he calls and I find out he’s twenty-four and lives in Brooklyn. I can’t think of any way to politely ask him his height over the phone, so I figure I’ll just have to wait to see him.
Did I mention I did not want this date?
So he comes to pick me up and he’s about six feet tall, which is nice. I’m pretty short but I still like tall guys.
I did everything I could to avoid him. And he knew it, too—knew that I would. But he was just cocky enough to intrigue me. Like, when I’d cancel a date, he’d get mad. And I’d be all, how dare he get mad at me—I don’t even like him!
Yes, I was a brat. But I wasn’t doing it on purpose. Really. Because you all know that when you try to act this way when you really like someone, it never works. You’ve got to be in full on denial mode.
It took him about three months or more to wear me down. And then he ended up proposing to me in my classroom in front of my students without getting clearance from the principal when I didn’t have tenure and almost caused a riot when all 150 of the kids I taught went running through the halls to find and congratulate us.
So see, it all worked out. And Lauren ended up in our wedding.
She’s getting married next year—Zoo and I were her only fix up ever. When anyone asks her how she knew to pair Zoo and I together, she shrugs and says, I just knew they’d be perfect for one another.
I guess that’s what I’d say to someone who asks me how I pick and choose the characters who’ll end up together. I just know.
—Stephanie Tyler
www.stephanietyler.com
#28
There’s a reason I believe in love. Actually, there are a lot of reasons, the most important being the people in my life. I’ve been blessed to have been surrounded by love growing up. I know, some people aren’t so lucky. But believe me when I say my family has had its share of divorce and health problems and heartache. But we’ve survived-because of the power of love and God’s presence in our lives.
My parents met and married when my mom was fifteen. Fifty-four years later, they’ve been through everything together. Have you ever heard the advice that if your marriage is on the rocks, don’t build a house or remodel? It’s true, because the stress and tension and problems that arise when doing those things have ended too many marriages to count.
But not my parents’ marriage. Over the years my parents built twenty-three houses together to help supplement our family’s income. Not bad for an Army vet with a sixth grade education and a high school drop out, eh? At twelve, my depression-era father had to go to work to help feed his family. And my mom-she dropped out because she was in love, simple as that. Things were hard. Oh, the stories they tell about their early years together! But love got them through, and when my father wised up to the fact that he could overcome his lack of education working in real estate, things began to look up.
Out of those twenty-three house builds, my parents moved a total of fifteen times-two of which took place in the same week! (Want to read an example of true love? Get this: Several years ago my father built yet another beautiful house, this one 6,000 square feet of beautiful tile, marble, wood molding and gorgeous cabinets. They moved, and the same week my mother was so homesick for her old house that my father moved her back!) Now tell me, how many husbands would do that? That’s love, no?
Did I mention a sense of humor helps? My Dad can still tease a blush to my mother’s cheeks when he brings up that move. But on the flipside, neither can talk about my mom’s cancer and fifty-fifty chance of survival without glancing at each other with teary eyes and an expression of soul-deep love and dedication.
The ability to laugh at the silly things that come up in life, the pet peeves and irritating, frustrating, I-can’t-believe-they-did-that moments, is HUGE when it comes to keeping maintaining one’s sanity. Through the hard years, the years when there wasn’t enough money, no jobs, tough, tough times, my parents were able to find the humor in their marriage. And in the dark times, they leaned on each other more, not less. People react to bad news in different ways, but I can’t describe how special it was to me to watch my parents fall in love all over again during my mother’s illness. They knew time was precious and they weren’t going to waste a single moment of it. Given all that I’ve seen, how can I not believe in love?
I’d be remiss if I didn’t include my husband’s family in this post as well. His father’s parents were married over fifty years before Chad’s grandfather passed away. His mother’s parents have been married sixty-eight years, and my husband’s parents have been married for thirty-nine years.
My husband and I? Surrounded by these examples, we’ve been together for twenty years, married for nearly seventeen. (Like the mullet and the poofy veil?)
We’ve laughed and cried and argued and fought (Oh, we’ve had some doozies!) and gone silent, but love has brought us through. Unlike Hollywood marriages where five years is considered extraordinary, we’ve seen and lived the proof that long marriages are possible. But they take a lot of work, dedication and good, old-fashioned sticking-power on the part of both parties, not just one.
I believe in love because I believe deep in my heart and soul that love is more powerful than hate. Love is the ability to forgive the slights and the arguments. Love is the kindness shown not only to each other, but to strangers in need. We’ve all experienced this type of love, even if we haven’t experienced marital longevity or bliss. Love is holding a door for the elderly or a frazzled mother pushing a stroller, delivering food to a family who mourning the loss of a loved one, donating clothes to a family burned out by fire, or sending a card to a friend down in the dumps. Where hate is destructive and ugly, love is beautiful and uplifting. It can’t be bought. It can’t be sold. And it even includes morning breath and bed-head, bad moods, weight gain, PMS, mid-life crises, and thinning hair. Love conquers all these things and more.
—Kay Stockham
www.kaystockham.com
www.Noveltalk.com
#29
I’d like to tell you three stories about my mother. A woman with a kind and fierce heart, she would face down a dragon if it threatened those she loved. Her clever humor more than once split my sides with laughter, and her mere disapproving glance could freeze me with guilt and remorse when both of us knew I done wrong. She was tolerant and fair, accepting of the differences and divergences in humanity. She was one of the strongest women I knew, with a spectacular creativity that in another time and place might have led her down the career path her daughter followed.
So…story number one. My parents’ marriage didn’t last long, less than a decade. Mom and Dad were better at being friends than being husband and wife. They divorced when I was fairly young (a traumatic and confusing time for me and my two older sisters), but I never saw a whit of animosity between them.
Around that time (early sixties), the courts in California decided in their wisdom that non-custodial dads should pay their child support to the courts instead of directly to their ex-wives. A law-abiding guy, my dad complied. But there was a fly in the ointment—the courts took their own sweet time turning around that money to the custodial moms. Since she needed the money now, instead of whenever the court got off its
butt to give it to her, my dad started paying double—one check to the courts, one directly to my mother.
But Dad didn’t have the wherewithal in those days to continue to write those two checks. So he stopped paying the court and sent the money directly to my mom. Big trouble descended upon him, requiring him to appear before a judge. My mother attended the hearing with him, clouding up and raining all over that judge, telling him that my dad was a good, responsible man, that the courts were at fault, that my dad had faithfully paid every penny of his child support obligation. In the face of my mother’s fierce defense, the judge agreed to a dispensation, allowing my father to henceforth pay my mother directly. She showed a different kind of love that day than that of a wife for her husband, but it was love nonetheless.
Story number two. My mother met Harry at the hospital where she worked in the mid-70s. Love at first sight. At the time, my mom was married to an alcoholic; Harry and his wife had drifted so far apart there was a chasm between them. Within weeks, both had filed for divorce and moved in together. They married as soon as they could.
He was raucous and rough-edged, but solid as a rock when it came to his love for my mother. She exasperated him on a daily basis—she had a tendency to borrow his tools, then forget where she left them. But Harry wrote love letters to her, pouring out his heart to her in a way you wouldn’t expect from a scrappy fighter like him. When he was dying of cancer, his only thought was for her. He feared she would pine away without him. She was strong when he died, but it was clear to all of us that this was the love of her life she was saying good-bye to.
Story three. Cancer struck my mother less than a year later. She fought, took her chemo with courage, traveled a hundred miles to see a specialist in Sacramento. But the cancer got the best of her, roaring through her body until she no longer had the strength to fight it.
We all gathered around her hospital bed in the last moments. But there was one person missing who needed to say good-bye. My youngest sister. Adopted into the family, she’d always felt a little on the outside of the rest of us. As we stood around the bed, my sister was on her way, racing to be with her mother before the end.
And Mom waited. She knew what it meant to my sister to be there. My sister walked into the room, touched my mother and said, “I’m here, Mom. You can go now.” Fifteen minutes later, she had breathed her last.
Leaving behind only her love for us.
—Karen Sandler
#30
I believe in love because love can work miracles.
For most of my life, I was an involuntary loner. I was different than most of the kids in Middle and High School; I loved to read, wasn’t big on sports or cheering on football games, preferred classical music to rock and was just socially awkward enough to find it difficult to make friends, let alone date like most of my peers.
For years I dealt with my loneliness by withdrawing further into my books and old movies, living in a world where love was very real to me. And then, one day in my late twenties, I met Serge.
I “met” him through a fan group devoted to one of my favorite authors, C. J. Cherryh. Serge and I, on opposite ends of the continent, had both been active in the group: Serge by appearing in a masquerade at one of the large World Science Fiction conventions, I by contributing frequently to a “round robin” of what would today be considered “blogs”, in the days before e-mail and the internet.
I don’t exactly remember what first brought us together: Serge recalls that I’d asked him to buy a few French-language magazines for me (when I was a huge fan of a certain movie actor); I remember that he asked me, as an artist, to illustrate a comic book he wanted to create.
Whatever the reason, we began to write to each other, I from California, he from Quebec, Canada. The letters (remember, this is pre-e-mail) grew longer and longer, expressing and sharing our innermost thoughts and wishes.
I clearly remember the moment I knew I was in love with Serge. He had been talking about the wonder of seeing his cat, Sissy, as she lay in a shaft of sunlight in his apartment; the gloss of her fur, the grace of her movements. And I thought, “anyone who can see such things as I do, feel such things as I do…well, he’s the man for me.”
Naturally, we were both a little scared. But I invited Serge to stay at my parents’ home in Concord, California, from where we would drive together down to Los Angeles for another WorldCon. It would all be entirely chaste, of course, but I was utterly terrified.
And when I finally met Serge, well…I lost all my certainty. Meeting him for the first time “in person” proved a little daunting for me, and I pulled away, though there was no doubt that we were still very good friends. Once at the convention, however—as we went our own separate ways to various panels and exhibits—I realized that I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Where was he? What was he doing now?
By the first evening, I knew my feelings hadn’t changed. I told him so. He was understandably cautious about my declaration; like most people our age, he’d suffered his share of disappointments. But as we drove back to northern California, we knew we’d keep seeing each other again and again. And we did: for two years, we depleted Serge’s savings by flying back and forth from California to Quebec. And then, with no further doubt in his mind, Serge proposed. From nearly 3,000 miles away.
That was my miracle of love. After twenty-odd years of no dating, no boyfriends, and no love affairs, I had found my perfect match. Twenty-two years later, we’re still together.
There are thousands of reasons to believe in love. But Serge will always be my first and foremost reason for my faith that love can be just around the corner, even when you lest expect it.
—Susan Krinard
www.susankrinard.com
#31
I was raised to believe in love.
My parents were born close to the time of the Great Depression, so there were many things I take for granted that they didn’t have. They gave me so many precious gifts. My parents taught me the power of having a sense of humor even in tough times. Even though they didn’t have a lot when they started out together, they still knew how to have fun.
My mother remembers wearing cotton dresses in winter and putting cardboard in her shoes to cover the holes in the soles as a child, so she made sure that we always had warm clothes in winter and new shoes every season. My mother was the youngest of four children and her parents didn’t always see the importance of affection, so when my mother had her children, she made sure to hug us several times a day. My parents taught me the magic of hugs.
My mother was a stay-at-home mom, but she learned how to do taxes and saved the money she earned to buy a piano so that we could learn the love and discipline of making music. That’s a gift that keeps on giving even after I stopped practicing “The Happy Farmer” by Schumann.
My father worked three and sometimes four jobs to support us and he showed his love by his amazing example of positive thinking and persistence. Those traits were critical for making my writing career a reality. To this day, he looks to find the positive in every situation. He’s the kind of man whom you can join for a golf game and by the end of it, even if your score is awful, he’ll point every good shot you made, every almost- good shot you made, and have you convinced you’re in the same league as Tiger Woods. My father is a master at seeing possibilities. Possibilities are what give us hope.
My parents fostered a love for the ocean. Even during the lean years, my parents loaded our family of five into the car, once in a Volkswagon with our dog in the back, and took us to the beach once a year. I still find enormous inspiration and peace from watching the waves, smelling the salt air and feeling the sand on my bare feet.
My parents showed me love by taking me to church so that I could experience the joy and comfort of having a faith in something larger than myself. The joy that comes from giving and the comfort of having something to hang onto during tough times. That ultimate love of our creator still humbles me.
I could go on a
bout how they paid for a full college education for all three daughters and provided the encouragement to each of us to complete our degrees, and all the emotional support they’ve provided throughout the years.
I am so blessed.
—Leanne Banks
www.leannebanks.com
#32
In December, I found a box of old photos at the bottom of some seldom-used Christmas decorations. The photo box had likely been in our former living room when the decorations were being packed away, and someone had mistakenly shoved it in with the Christmas stuff.
The photos were all rejects.
You know which ones I mean. The good shots had long ago been culled out and placed in albums for everyone to see. These were the photos that hadn’t quite made the grade, but they were suddenly very precious because we’d lost all our family albums during Katrina. The Christmas decorations had been in the attic during the hurricane and had survived, thankfully, and I thought all my photos were lost until I found this stash. It was far better than finding gold.
Many of the photos were out of focus and the lighting was off, but as I went through each one, I saw them for the miracles that they are. Yes, I know that sounds corny, but it’s how I felt.
All the shots were taken in the late ‘80s, two decades ago when my children were still in the rug-rat stage. Before finding the photos, if you had asked me about that year, I would have told you how hard it was. I was a stay-at-home mom with three kids, one of them autistic, and all under the age of five. My husband was an Air Force captain, and since I wasn’t working, money was tight. In addition, he was working a sixty-hour week, and that meant I was home a lot with three rowdy kids. Added to that, we were on an assignment that I hated and were living in an old base house that was beyond depressing. Those were my memories of that year-the stress, the lack of sleep, the isolation. And then I found those pictures.
A Valentine for Harlequin's Anniversary Page 4
