summer love

I have a long history of falling in love with authors. I remember playing the Authors children’s card game and hoping against hope that I would end up with the set of Nathaniel Hawthorne or Robert Louis Stevenson (whom my children irreverently refer to as Bob Louie Steve). The golden hair and moustache of the first and the soulful eyes of the latter thrilled my heart at the time, as their books did in later years.

I remember finishing the Chronicles of Narnia with a sigh when I was a bit older, closing my eyes and saying, “I want to marry the man who wrote this.” I did not know at the time that Lewis was 1) already dead, and 2) scholarly, stodgy and balding. I’m not sure which of those would have presented the greater obstacle to my 11 year old mind. I suspect the latter.

I have recently fallen in love again. Today’s author is also somewhat scholarly, balding (if you can believe the picture on his website, though the picture on the first dust jacket I saw looked completely different!) But the reader that I am today is much more forgiving of a few more pounds and a little less hair, and “scholarly” sounds rather attractive. The only real problem I can see is that (I only know this, also, from the dust jacket), he is married and has two children. (I am also married and quite a bit more committed in the way of children.) And while he is the man who speaks my innermost thoughts and lays bare the angst I wake with in the middle of the night, I am, alas, only one of millions of book club groupies. He probably wouldn’t give my dust jacket a second glance, if I even had one.

Seriously, though, while I’m not about to run off to Louisiana tomorrow, I was so moved by the first book I read by this guy that I immediately went to Amazon and bought five more of his works. I have not been disappointed yet. The first book I read was actually written in the first person by a female narrator who is close to forty as the book begins and she is perfect, she KNOWS things I would not have believed a man could know. And, it takes place in the deep South and all the terms of endearment are ones I remember from my brief but happy years spent below the Mason-Dixon line!

The other two books I have read so far focus more on the husbands’ characters, but they are all about marriage and what happens between two people who spend long years together in the same enterprise – parenthood. They illustrate the huge amount of unknowing that exists in even the most intimate relationships, but also the unbreakable ties between people who have shared a life and created new lives together. They remind the reader that the physical tangle of bodies and bedclothes is really just a metaphor for the tangle of hearts and histories that follows.

The books have caused me to reflect on the troubled but unbreakable bonds I’ve seen between some of my married friends; the ways in which children have seemed to bless some relationships and doom others; the chasm which exists between me, who have never lost a child, and friends who have walked through that dark valley; the ways that my own children have forged a stronger bond between my husband and I than either vows or feelings could. They have caused me to cherish each day with my children who are growing up and away from me as surely as tomorrow follows today.

So, although I am spending long, summer days with my new favorite guy, relishing his every word picture and description, ducking into his books every chance I get, what he keeps whispering in my ear is to look at my marriage and my children with fresh eyes, to hold them close, to remember that what matters at the end of life is how faithfully we have loved the people God has given us to love.