Love

Written by Hand

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I awoke to a sticky note like the one pictured above this morning (stolen from my stash without repayment!) bearing a note from my girlfriend. Today she had made my coffee before she headed out.

It is always a welcome sight. (The handwritten note, not just the coffee.)
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Listen, Do You Want to Know a Secret?

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The Atlantic Ocean. Each one of those tiny dots in the photo above is a person with a life, a voice, loved ones, losses. Sunburns.

We are standing, you and I, in front of the “Beach Hut” at Smith Point County Park on the South Shore of Long Island. It is 2014, one of the more recent years in history. For much of my adult life, I have sat here internally convinced that I do not like “the beach.” I do not remember when I convinced myself of this. I do not remember an unpleasant beach incident that convinced me that I possessed this piece of self-knowledge about my … self.
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‘We must be still and still moving …’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich


     Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
 
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.—T.S. Eliot, the conclusion of “East Coker”

Just a few weeks ago, he and I were talking about his daughter, my girlfriend. I do not remember every syllable of the conversation, and I wish I did remember each syllable right now, but I declared, “All I know is that it took me an awful long time to find The One for me, and I’m lucky I waited for someone so …”

“Passionate.” He finished the sentence. He chose that word. “She’s full of life,” he added. It was a happy surprise to hear Jen’s father say it himself. He was smiling.
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