About This Thing Called Love

Another Valentine’s Day has come and gone and, once again, I’ve successfully ignored another commercial and contrived Hallmark holiday. This year, the hearts and roses were largely overshadowed at least in my Los Angeles neighborhood by America’s more meaningful holiday, the NFL Super Bowl.

Let’s face it, Americans: You can get red roses any time but getting a Super Bowl win is magic performed only on the occasional decade.

I confess that there’s a sweetness to Valentine’s Day that I don’t dismiss lightly. When my boys were little, they never failed to make me a card and deliver it with expectant eyes, knowing I would be thrilled beyond words with their scrawled artwork and indecipherable words. I loved the cards because I loved the boys, not the other way around. I had the love before I held the cards.

But if there’s something sweet about Valentine’s Day, there are also reasons for sadness. While some mates and lovers exchange gifts “just because,” there appear to be at least as many seekers as there are lovers. I’m not much cheered by the fact that dating apps nearly crashed with the overload of people seeking someone to date, potentially someone to love and, even more probably, someone to love them. And the irritably practical side of me is saddened to recognize that this year Americans invested $24 billion in Valentine cards, roses and meals while putting $170 million into the search to cure childhood cancers; c’mon, America, that’s sad.

Like everyone else, I’ve become conditioned to see love in Hollywood images and hear it in romantic music. It’s all as light and airy as confection. Am I just being grouchy and old when I protest that falling in and out of love isn’t love; it’s just waves of hormonally driven affection and come and go? Revolving-door romance is about as nourishing to our souls (and social structures like marriage) as the frosting on my favorite carrot cake.

Perhaps I should keep these thoughts to myself. I have children, after all, and a grandchild. They may some time want to make me a Valentine and I wouldn’t want to miss it. I’m just a sap for children’s expressions of love. Give me a sloppy kiss from a two-year-old whose face is lathered with peanut butter and I’ll tell you this is about as good as life gets.

But then comes adulthood. Valentines go into the drawer. And, by now, it’d be good if we knew something about love that isn’t the plot of a romcom or the subject of one more misty photograph of hands being held by candlelight. Of course I’m not talking about romance any more. Now I’m leaning into love. Real love. The kind of love that doesn’t fade when our hair thins and greys, when our energy fades at four in the afternoon and we wonder if we’ll outlive this or the next pandemic.

Let me warn you: I’m going to quote C.S. Lewis which means I’m going to get serious. Lewis both thought and wrote brilliantly. And, germane to this moment, Lewis loved deeply. As his love for his bride, Joy, exploded into a wonderful marriage, he almost immediately began to lose her. Joy was sick through much of their marriage. Just short of their fifth anniversary, she slipped away.

In the shadow of a loss he could not contain, Lewis wrote: “To love at all is to be vulnerable.” If you wonder what he meant, very slowly read the way he described how we avoid that vulnerability:

“Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries, avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. Because to love is to be vulnerable.”

If I love my child, I am vulnerable to the pain that may one day come with rejection. Loving a grandchild or a great friend is taking a risk with one’s heart. Lewis, for all his brilliance, could  find no easy comfort in the wake of Joy’s passing. His heart was broken, ripped apart by an illness he could not stop and a death he could not prevent. He knew love, knew it intensely, and fully understood his reference to caskets and coffins. He knew the selfish desire to spare ourselves pain and he knew, oh how he knew, the cost of vulnerability.  

So…have I loved and been loved? Yes.

Has love hurt? Of course.

Has my heart been broken? More than once, for a time.

To be fully human is, in fact, to be vulnerable, as Kate Bowler reminds us with the title of her newest book, “No Cure to Being Human.” The best we can do is accept our vulnerability, seek out those we trust to deal gently with us, and care for one another until we or they, like Lewis, feel the awful weight of loss.

I admit I’m skeptical when a pundit or a hippie tells me that the resolution of all injustice, the answer to racism, the proper response to White Nationalism – the “fix” for all these evils – is love. It’s too simple. It doesn’t work. It can’t be right. Then comes another Valentine’s Day sparking another round of thoughts about love, and I wonder. It may be that there’s no cure to being human. But it’s also true that there’s no insight deeper than that of C.S. Lewis.

Let us go bravely toward next year’s Valentine’s Day, being vulnerable with courage. Let us love without holding back.

intimacy in a Pandemic

Whatever else we say of the COVID pandemic, we can safely say this: It’s changed us.

Two years ago we showered in the morning and rinsed our hands before eating. Now we wash our hands maniacally, as if we’ve committed some blood-soaked crime to be scrubbed away with soap and water.

If we dare step outside our homes, we stay six feet from other human beings. Social distancing, once imagined as a neurotic fear of nearness to others, is now a mandate.

Face masks in banks are no longer signs of a robbery in progress. They represent our desire to stay well, and our willingness to protect others from us. The idea of “school” has been reinvented with “virtual” and “in-person,” and our assumptions about work have made the same move.  

For some the overwhelming feature of the pandemic has been isolation. For two years, I’ve been home, and almost nowhere else save for critical healthcare appointments and the occasional moment with my toddler granddaughter. My days begin with a cup of “Joe” and end with “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

Polio survivors in the 1950s often endured life in so-called “iron lungs.” For these wretched folk, television was redemptive, bringing a connection to the larger world beyond their six-by-three-foot life-saving tomb. I’d never have identified with this experience had it not been for the past 23 months. While I’m not suffering as they did, I’m finding my interchange with the world where they found theirs: television. It takes me into the world and, more importantly, it comes into mine with a power and intimacy I’m only now recognizing.

Take Rachel Maddow, for example. She comes into the homes of millions of Americans nightly. Her voice is as familiar as what we’d hear at a family dinner. Her smile is infectious. When we say “Rachel,” everyone knows who we mean. She’s my companion every weekday evening.

No wonder that I felt a tinge of panic when, earlier this week, she announced a brief (2-month) hiatus to focus on some projects that are wilting for lack of her time. I understand. But I’m not sure I approve. Who’s going to fill her place in my evenings? Who else can analyze America’s political landscape with her genius? With her bachelor’s degree in public policy from Stanford University and her doctorate in political science from Oxford University, she knows whereof she speaks. I can’t imagine understanding the world without her nightly visits.

Besides, I have three personal connections to Rachel. First, we met once.  She was incredibly gracious. If I was a little awe-struck, she immediately put me at ease. She asked about my experience in the AIDS community as someone who had studied AIDS in-depth (she did, for her doctoral thesis). I was grateful to be in her presence; she spoke as if the honor were hers. Amazing.

Second, we share a political legacy. Asked once what it meant to be a “liberal” she said it was simple: “It means I’m in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican Party platform.” Me too.

And, third, she’s stepping away from her nightly visits to my home in part to work on a film adapted from “Bag Man,” a podcast she hosted about the 1970s scandal and resignation of then-Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. It was Agnew who unwittingly changed my life.

Agnew was Nixon’s vice president, and he was found to be accepting bribes and cash influence while in the vice president’s office. Literally. Men came by with bags full of cash to support Agnew’s causes and candidates and lavish lifestyle. Then the truth slithered out, and he was offered a choice between prison and resignation. He took resignation, thereby opening a position that Nixon filled by plucking Congressman Gerald R. Ford from the House of Representatives and having him confirmed in December of 1973. (Stay with me here.)

Then came Nixon’s own scandal (Watergate), and eight months after he had been chosen as Vice President – August 8, 1974 – Ford became President. He’d come from Michigan, my home state. He knew our family. He knew I’d organized some events. And before the winter holidays of 1974, I had been named the first woman “advanceman” in White House history. Thanks to Spiro T. Agnew, I had become a footnote in history.

I don’t expect to show up in Rachel’s “Bag Man” film. But I’m counting on her to show up in my home each weeknight evening come April. I can endure two months of isolation while waiting for her return but, like the pandemic itself, her hiatus needs to come to an end.

Besides, what Rachel has brought to me, and to so many, isn’t merely a casual intimacy in her conversational style. Its genuine insight based on knowledge. She sees the immorality of the Moral Majority in historic perspective. She saw the seeds of White Nationalism and the violence of January 6 long before others. She’s wise, and I will miss her wisdom.

I totally understand the need to have a break, to re-sort priorities, to chase deferred dreams, to make a difference in new ways. I get it, and I support it. No one deserves it more than her.

But evenings at home are going to be a bit lonely without house calls from Dr. Maddow.

Guest Essay

Most high school friendships became occasional contacts which eventually became “What ever happened to…?” With one exception: Stuart White.

From our first, adolescent meeting, I knew Stu was wise, entertaining and generous. A half-century later, he’s still all those things and more. Example? When word got out that I was headed to AIDS, he reached out with quiet affection, assuring me that he would always “be there” for me. Always. It’s a promise he’s kept for, so far, 30 years.

Stu could have filled his life with corporate leadership and public recognition. Instead, he chose to be a high school teacher, molding teenagers into their best selves: intelligent, compassionate critical thinkers.

When I asked Stu what made this possible, he told me about a remarkable woman: Margaret. Here, in Stu’s own words, is that story.

Seeing Without Sight

Helen Keller’s first word was “W A T E R.” — My sightless mother taught us to swim, fish and water ski.

By Stuart White

I once believed that my mother was eternally disappointed in all of her children and most of her adult friends. I arrived at this alarming conclusion not because she was dominating or arrogant but because she expected others to match her own performance without regard to personal circumstances or handicaps. Without saying it, she said “I am able to do so much without eyesight; you should aim higher.”

Her life was a litany of achievements, all the more imposing when compared to others facing fewer barriers. In her wake, my mother left many of us feeling inadequate. When measured against her accomplishments, we came up short, disappointing her and disappointing ourselves.

Living with my mother was not difficult. It was educational, even inspirational. Walking with my mother in public, her arm gently on mine as we navigated steps, escalators, crowds, hiking trails, ski slopes, golf courses, or European castles would evoke varied reactions from a curious public. Others were beyond earshot when she’d chide me, “Stuart, you don’t need to tell me how many stairs. I will figure it out!” My daughter remembered it perfectly, “When I would walk into a room with Grandma and the people would stare, I felt empowered and proud.”

Raising an unsighted child in 1920 might have included an overwhelming burden but there’s no evidence that her family ever modified their expectations to fit her blindness. There were no excuses, no limitations, no allowances. After all, Margaret always expected to be included, never excluded.

Early tutoring revealed a bright child who quickly took to Braille. She was mainstreamed into the general Detroit public classroom population: 75 kids in a class. It was up to her to navigate changing classes in crowded hallways.

Her summers were dominated by lake activities. The lake was her gym, her studio and her laboratory. A tireless swimmer, she convinced her parents that she could handle a canoe on the lake. With her dog barking out where the banks of the lake turned, my mother paddled out and back home. Decades later, when she lived alone on the lake, she would take a portable radio to the end of the dock, turn it up, and then swim out into the lake and back. As a child, she learned to fish; as an adult she would bait our worms because we found it gross. The acute sense of touch in her hands usually made her catch a fish immediately. She learned to ice skate on the vast frozen lake. Decades later, she would challenge her grandchildren to races on the dark ice as the lake made those ancient groaning sounds forty feet down. “Don’t worry kids! We’ve never fallen through yet!” She learned to water ski. She cherished flying outside the wake. Decades later in her fifties, while water skiing, she survived a frightening collision with a sailboat. Age did not keep her from the annual swim from her dock out to the island and back.

Once, when I was three years old, I went missing during our usual Sunday family dinners at the lake house. Apparently, I had wandered away from the group and toddled into the lake. I was found in the water and, amidst the chaos of family panic on the lawn, it was my mother who calmly performed CPR and revived me.

Margaret’s strong-willed parents were susceptible to her emerging ability to influence. They supported her applications to distant colleges. In 1938, Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA admitted her. Train travel, often alone, ended when she graduated with honors completing a degree in Economics in 1942.

By then, her master plan was to graduate college and marry Gene, who she had met at Detroit seasonal parties. Enlisting only weeks after Pearl Harbor, Gene was stationed in Everett, WA. Hoping to influence Gene’s commanding officer, Margaret wrote him asking permission for Gene to return to Chicago for their wedding. When her request was rejected she took the train to Washington for a smaller-than-desired wedding. The plan for the new couple was to live off base for six weeks before orders for The Aleutian Islands arrived. The orders came two days after their marriage leaving Margaret to manage alone her three-day train trip home.

Margaret and Gene adopted four children, beginning with me in 1947. The Chicago adoption agency understandably expressed reluctance to place a baby with a blind woman. Subsequent home visits and interviews enabled Margaret to successfully ply her skills at persuasion. Four decades later, I made an unscheduled visit to the agency and actually met the social worker who had conducted the home visits and approved my adoption. She told me of the agency’s hesitancy and how in Margaret’s presence those doubts evaporated.

Margaret’s greatest life challenge began in 1974 when cancer took my father and the family manufacturing company needed a new and active Board Chair. Armed with her Braille notebooks of financial and operational reports, full of confidence from previous board work and inspired by her own father’s work ethic, she assumed the role of Chairwoman of the Board. For nineteen years, first in Detroit and then in South Carolina, she led the company with distinction. When she passed the Chair’s mantle of leadership to me in 1993, her lone instruction was “hold their feet to the fire, Stuart!” She had always demanded performance from the company’s officers that at least equaled her own.

With age, my mother’s world began to shrink. She lost her incredible ability to catalog data and recall it. She could no longer read her Braille books. With a knitted blanket on her lap, she passed her fingers over the blanket as though she was translating the raised dots of Braille into knowledge. She could no longer recognize that the blanket offered no information and that the blanket’s textured bumps offered no story.

A life fully examined is my seminal description of my mother.

I wish that I could use that phrase to describe myself these days. But I have become a COVID casualty. My own attention to detail is waning. My patience is short, if not shot. I am disturbingly impulsive. If I was a critical thinker, I am now a shallow lizard brain. I want to shoot my television and just as impulsively I want to watch it some more. If I miss a nightly newscast, I worry that I am not adequately informed. My rush to judgment is exasperating and increasingly apparent to my family and friends. I have lost my balance.

Unlike me in my frenzied COVID state, my mother’s tranquil fingers would trace the facial contours of newly arrived grandchildren and she would “see” them. Her grace and poise were apparent in her appearance, her demeanor and her mere presence. She learned how to pose with dignity for a photograph. She could describe the difference between royal blue and baby blue to an unsuspecting retail clerk at Harrods, though she could not see. Her confidence was precise when she prepared a dinner for eight guests or when she shuffled the cards at her Bridge table. Her resolve at the Board table was no less measured.

She didn’t intend to give me her epitaph as, well into her 70’s, together we canoed a Michigan river, she in the bow and me in the stern. I was in awe of her exquisite balance as we would duck under low-hanging branches and we would lean into the turns of the river.

When I mentioned my admiration, she paused for a moment before saying, softly, “Stuart, I have been working on balance all my life.”