Loving Life As It Is

One of our most anticipated events around here each year (don't laugh) is the plum harvest, and this year we got a bumper crop, but it's always a shock how fast it passes! All the plums on the tree ripen within days of each other, it seems, and then -- just as quickly as it started, it's over.

High winds destroyed much of last year's crop; not so this year. As it ripens, this variety of plum turns from green to pink to red to purple to a deep purple that almost seems black.

When you taste one, the juice gushes from inside the soft outer skin, revealing a yellow-red flesh that is both tart and sweet at the same time. A perfect plum from this tree is, in my experience, incomparable in taste.

Perfect.

Nature is good at perfection. When I look at my six children and five grand-children, I see eleven different shades of perfection. My oldest son, who had his birthday a few days back, is teaching at Woods Hole this week.

The perfection of each one of them is so complete that it is pointless to compare them to each other. Of course, parents are tempted to do this all the time -- this one is more athletic, that one is better in school, this one is quieter, that one more socially graceful.

But the danger in making these types of comparisons is that we all change over time, and none more than the young. The quiet ones can become loud and the more confident ones can hit a speed bump in life, and lose some of their self-confidence.

Character, or perhaps a better way to put it would be the dominant characteristics that people exhibit, are fluid along a scale from one extreme to another. At different stages of life, depending what is happening environmentally, most of us slide along that scale.

Perfection, in human beings, is a matter of perspective. And it is not universal. My children may be perfect in my eyes, but when I look in the mirror, the man staring back at me, who almost never smiles, is far from it.

Our flaws.

When we fall in love with somebody, I suspect, it is their flaws that attract us as much as their perfections. The women I've loved all are strong, smart, wonderful human beings, and they all too could be viewed as deeply flawed human beings.

Looking at them, even in retrospect, long after all "love" is supposedly gone, I remember their vulnerabilities as clearly as their successes. Maybe I was a better partner in hard times than in good times -- that's not for me to say.

But the privilege of taking care of someone when she was down -- physically, emotionally, professionally -- never turned me away. In fact, I've never stopped believing in any of my exes.

Some had fantasies of being great writers or designers, and I always felt they were great in those fields. Others aspired to be great parents and they have proved to be beyond great -- fabulous parents, including both of my ex-wives.

Some had a crisis of confidence at some point, often (in my view) an inevitable result of a society that sometimes seems to expect every woman to look a certain way, balance home and work perfectly, and perform at a superior level in all aspects of her life.

Having been involved with women of different ethnicities and races and colors, I (personally) don't see "beauty" through any of those filters. It's also extremely difficult for me to only focus on the outside of a person.

Getting to know a woman, when physical attraction is involved, starts on the outside, for sure. You can't pretend to be attracted when you're not.

But once you've got that issue over with, the true beauty, the one you inevitably fall in love with, is on the inside. That's where vulnerabilities, or "flaws" come in. It's my sense, at least in my experience, that these are the characteristics I fell in love with.

Not that what they considered their weaknesses were paramount, just that maybe that's where I thought I might fit into the picture.

Maybe I could help them feel better about themselves. At least here was a man who saw them as perfect despite what they thought were flaws.

Or something like that.

Not that any of it matters any longer.

Today it is strange I am blogging about love. Maybe I am trying to recover from the first meeting with my IRS auditor, here in my home.

Maybe I'm trying to imagine that life is more than numbers plus plums. Maybe I'm hoping that in the end human connection actually matters.

Even at the very end of our time, what are we left with? Our fantasies, our unclaimed hopes, our regrets, the loss of our short-term memory, and the rest of it?

Or love, in whatever form we found it, lost it, and can recall it. Funny, that. I can't remember some key details from last week but I remember the look in the eyes of every lover I've ever had on that first night when we first truly saw one another.

That, I guess, I will take with me to my grave.

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