Love, Sideways

Every night when my grandfather came home from his job at Continental Can Company in East L.A., he’d lay his lunchpail on the kitchen table.

“Hello, Lloyd,” Grandma would say.

“Hello, battleaxe,” he’d reply.

They were married until death, more than 30 years.

When I was in the Air Force and temporarily stationed at Chicksands, England (all too temporarily, alas), I was drinking with some friends in a hotel room. One of the NCO’s had married a pretty red-haired English girl.

“You know what love is?” one of my friends asked me.

“Tell me.”

“That guy (the NCO) has a wife who goes in and sits on the toilet seat to warm it up before he uses it.”

I’ll bet, even though that was more than 40 years ago, that those two are still married.

Love, love, love. It’s said to make the world go round, though I have my doubts about that. But those few fortunate souls among us who have truly found love almost never realize it. Whether we call our wives “battleaxe” or they warm up the toilet seat for us, we take them for granted. They take us for granted.

People in love almost never, ever say “I love you.” Indeed, my brother’s wife gets suspicious when Glenn tells her that. “What have you done now?” she asks.

I guess I’m still waiting for a novel, particularly in the mystery genre, to portray two people who are truly in love. Not the first flush of love, not the hot for your body teenager love, not the sappy “I love you a million plus one” type of faux-love. The kind where you yell at the other person for forgetting to take out the trash. You can yell because you know they’re not going to leave you.

Sadly, your correspondent has not known this kind of love, at least not in the long run. The one woman in my life who I thought truly loved me broke up with me after 4 months. Up till that time, she’d been loving and nurturing. But one seemingly false move and it was all over.

Still, I’ve known people in my life who truly were in love.

Recently I was in a messaging conversation with my good friend Bob Singer, whom I’ve known since we both in the Air Force as 20-year-old men. Bob was married to his wife for decades before her death a few years ago.

Bob has stayed in shape and is still working a tech job while in his sixties. I joked with him that he probably had a 25-year-old girlfriend. He responded that no, he doesn’t date and is still in love with his late wife.

Like a wolf, he mated for life.

Damn, am I jealous.