My Life's Not Over

The last thing I ever wanted to be was conventional; not that there's anything wrong with it, it's just not for me. I am however a romantic. I just spent the evening with 3 generation of couples. I'm in Pittsburgh for the christening of my childhood best friend's first child. Around the dinner table were my friend and her husband, her in-laws and her aunt and uncle. I heard the most wonderful stories of how these couples ended up together. The In-laws: Helen was still in college and Art had gone away to law school. Their relationship had been over for quite some time. Somehow, Helen ended up in the infirmary, surely sick but misdiagnosed with dysentery. Perhaps that's what lead to her entering the nursing field, but I digress. She was there, in bed, with "dysentery" and out of the blue, in walks Art.

"All I could do was put the sheet over my head! “Remember when you came to the infirmary?” Helen reminds Art as she puts her hand on his shoulder. He smiles and makes a joke of how he had come back to the college to see another girlfriend. “You lie,” answers Helen with all the assurance of a woman who knows she's loved or at least was in that moment.

The Aunt and Uncle: Rogie and her family came to the US from Hungary during WWII and ended up in Cleveland. On a trip to Hamilton Canada to go to a friend's wedding, she fell in love with the best man. And so their romance started over the telephone wires. He called her every Sunday. He wanted to marry her but, a modern woman before her time, she said, "why don't we get to know each other better first." She was so modern in fact that she even got to go visit him in Canada... on her own. Remember a road trip back then from Cleveland to Hamilton took about 10 hours, now it takes 7 thanks to modern highways! Her father wasn't that thrilled, but he let her go. “You're going to marry him?” he asked disapprovingly. Rogie's family waited 6 years to leave Hungary to come to the US and now, after all that, she's going to live in Canada! 60 yrs later, the answer is still Yes!

And then there's my friend's story. Her brother and her husband's brother were freshman year college roommates and the families happened to live close to one another. So Vicki needed a prom date and well one brother asked the other brother if his younger brother would want to take his sister. Read that again if you need too.

“What about you?” Art asks me. “I have a broken engagement on my resume,” I answer. “Broken by my doing.” I feel the need to add. “And I broke up with someone in January- again by my doing.” Helen interjects, “I find it's always for the best when that happens.” She's right and I explain that out of all the men in my past (I realize the line sounds like there were many but there weren't, they just all lasted a long time) my fiancé is the one I rarely ever think about in a should've would've could've sort of way. Maybe because it’s the one that got the closest to fruition, maybe because it was evident to most people living in the real world, besides myself of course, that it was doomed from the beginning. Those are the only answers I have for the unanswerable.

Back at the house Vicki pulls out a photo album, a “How I Met Your Mother” photo album a la Ted Mosby- This Album was full of photos, mostly from 1952 when her father, George, met her mother, Ida. To say Ida was a looker is a grave understatement. Rogie commented on how on any street corner on any given day when she and Ida were walking around Cleveland the men would roll down their windows to get a better look at her. And if they had the courage, they'd actually say something.

George, after much persuasion, won her heart. This album was full of black and white photos of the two of them in their best clothes on what would be a normal Sunday where today we'd feel over dressed in anything other than jeans. I wonder if modernity has really bettered us at this point. Beneath each photo is a caption in his neatest handwriting saying things like “I don't know about you but I find her to be tres jolie.” We reminisced about how George was indeed such a romantic, how in love with Ida he was from the moment he saw her until his last breath. I feel like they and their love are immortalized in those photos that are so old they fall out of the album as you turn the pages because the glue has worn off.

Even my own parents broke up for 3 years and then found themselves bumping into one another as my mom was on her way back from the beach and my father was back in town from medical school. He asked her to have dinner with him that night and when he left, my mom turned to her friend and told her “I'm not going to the movies with you anymore, I have to get my hair done.”

As much as I don't want a conventional life, I seem to find everything about life in a time when convention was revered and Donna reed reigned to be so ideal. Photos from the 50's look better than photos from today, women dressed better, women dressed period; and things seemed mapped out. You went to school and you got married. I know that it wasn't all wine and roses, those days are certainly not long. But what strikes me is what the thought of those days and those stories evoke. Does Serendipity come close to the romance in Casablanca? I love serendipity don't get me wrong. It's just a feeling that somehow, as we've become more modern we've lost our charm.

Love is elusive. I think you're either lucky enough to find it and hold on to it or you're forever trying to find "the one" as you string one relationship after another around the cord you eventually wrap too tightly around your own neck.

I was recently at a wedding of a friend in NYC. It was a small wedding at the courthouse that preceded their official ceremony with family in Mexico. A small group of us were in attendance, 7 guests to be exact. While you could assume that there were seven individuals all random good friends, you'd be wrong and well, I'd have nothing to write about. Indeed, there were 3 couples and...me. When someone joked about tossing the bouquet it was graciously pointed out that she should just give it to me since I was the only single one there. A fact that I didn't really take note of until the comment was made.

So I wondered, how did all these couples know...know that the other person whose name they took or whose in-laws they agreed to suffer was the one.

One person from the wedding party, whose parents oddly enough were also from Hungary, told the story of how her mother and father met. Her mother was riding a cable car and saw him, her hero- a filmmaker whose films she adored. She jumped out of the cable car, professed her love and said, "Do with me what you will." He had only one question for her, “Will you move to NYC?” Later that day, in her black leather mini skirt, they got married. They divorced after 25 years. But I don't think the one means you're going to be happy with them, I believe the one means, they're the one-and this is where for better or worse comes in-barring any kind of abuse of course.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about the one, how you know, if there even is a one to begin with. My ex-the one that lives a block away-asked me if my first love, an 8 year long-distance passionate roller coaster of a relationship filled with one major car wreck, outrageously high telephone bills, airport greetings and inseparable weekends and a refused marriage proposal, was the love of my life. I, being quick-witted and hopefully skilled in the art of flirting replied, “Well...my life's not over...I sure hope not.”

In a time where finding the one seems even more unlikely than winning the lottery I think I should have answered yes.

For someone who wants so much to be unconventional, it seems that all I really want is an unconventional love that so many people seem to have, making it ironically-conventional. Then again, my life’s not over.