When we come into the world, we immediately become pupils in the school of love. Of course, no one calls it that, and we certainly don’t recognize that fact then if ever. But all of our experiences including family relationships, friends, romantic partners, religious settings, cultural influences such as books, movies and music, pets we acquire and objects we attach to combine to give each of us a working definition of love. Much of what we learn about love is mysterious. Shouldn’t love be easy? Why is sustaining love often difficult? What might it mean to really “love our neighbor” and “as ourself??” Why are there so many stories about love gone wrong? Why do we often take love for granted? Why do we still long for a happy ending? Why can the same love that heals also hurt? Why do we still love in the face of betrayal? Is there such a thing as unconditional love?  And I haven’t even begun to touch on erotic love. That topic will only occur on the edges of future posts though since this will remain G-rated and is not a tell-all,

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Our first lessons come to us as babies. And already we are learning much. Is our birth cause for joy or regret? We pick up clues from how we are held and talked to. Are we assigned a task such as with many babies of teen mothers to love rather than to be loved? We absorb a lot without knowing it, and it will show up throughout our lives for better or worse. But we are designed to seek love and our little faces grin expectantly.

Thinking about puppy love and school crushes led me to reflect on falling for men on the big screen. My two favorite were and remain Paul Newman and Denzel Washington. I fell for Paul in high school. I didn’t fall for Denzel until, as a single mother, I began to watch the television series “St. Elsewhere.” I never fantasized about singers while my friends screamed for Elvis and decorated their rooms with his posters. Even the Beatles failed to engage my interest, though, when pushed, I would say I liked John–the moody one–the best. My sister had a monumental crush on Paul(McCartney, not Newman!)But oh those men on those gigantic movie screens!(I quickly found Denzel in the movies. The TV Denzel was just too small to really captivate me.)

I was fond of joking that I would watch either man in an advertisement for rutabagas, so enamored I was by each. Paul lived in Connecticut between our house and New York City. Something about his actual proximity to me in Connecticut fed my secret life. When I would drive through Westport on my way to the City, I would always give him a shout out. Even now that he is gone I toot and say hello to his memory as I drive by.

In 1959, my parents went to Hawaii on a Matson Line ship courtesy of the company since my father did legal work for them. The highlight of the trip for my mother was not the beach, not the sun, not the exotic volcano. She was beyond excited by spotting William Holden(her screen love) on the beach at Waikiki. She didn’t need to talk to him; it was enough to be actually sharing the same stretch of sand.

I have no idea if young girls still fall for movie stars. I have no idea of boys of my generation fell for movie stars. All I know for sure is that when either Paul or Denzel leaned in for a kiss, it was me he was aiming for!

In 1960, when I was in eighth grade, Paul Anka made a hit with his tune “Puppy Love.” It was in the long tradition of young love discounted by adults. Since I was part of the huge baby boom coming into our teen years, misunderstood by our parents, it was a very popular song. Puppy love seems a pretty good put down to dismiss the feelings that first seem to pop up in early adolescence. Perhaps the name allows the parent to stave off for a while the realization that their child is growing up and will make her own romantic choices

My granddaughter found the diary I kept in fifth grade. I make constant references to “James” a boy in my class. I note if he is in class, if he is absent, if he notices me or not. Then I relate the painful moment when “Janice” tells “James” that I like him. This, of course, violates all the rules, and I get back at her by telling “Andy” that “Janice” likes him. My grandchildren think it hilarious that I had a crush on a boy and promptly looked him up in my class yearbook. They laughed even harder when they saw what “James” looked like. They didn’t find him cute.

But I think I was onto something in fifth grade. Amazingly enough, one night I was at a bar and noticed an attractive man across the room. We met up and unbelievably enough, it was “James!” No more came of it then than in fifth grade, but my tastes seemed not to have changed much.

Here’s to those first crushes, those puppy loves, that time when we begin to think that maybe romance isn’t “totally gross.” It’s the time in our lives we stop having to close our eyes when two people kiss in the movies!

I have had a great time throughout January writing about fun and games. I have learned a lot about how much in common I have in other bloggers around the world. I have pondered how it is that a game with five stones can be played in India and England and how around the globe people toss sticks and rocks. Since February features Valentine’s Day in its middle, I thought I would write about love in all its many manifestations. I am starting off with a snapshot of a sampler I made 35 years ago, before I was married to my present husband. It hangs over our bed, a constant reminder of the many delights and challenges that love brings.

I look forward to exploring love in its many dimensions throughout the month. I will also enjoy comments that arise from my contemplations. Love to you all.

I went to many birthday parties when I was a child. They were all held in the birthday child’s home, and they all followed the same format. The party started out with games, followed by the birthday girl(I only went to girls’ parties) opening her presents, followed by ice cream and cake. The cake always had the number of candles to represent the birthday and was brought lit to the table for the girl to make a wish and blow out the candles. No one hired clowns or magicians. No one had her party at another location such as a pizza parlor(there weren’t any) or an arcade(there weren’t any). Parties were, therefore, pretty affordable and noncompetitive.

Every party had a variety of pin the tail on the donkey, sometimes nose on the clown, sometimes bow on the hair. Each child was blindfolded, turned around three times, handed a tail(or a nose or a bow) and directed to stick in on the donkey(or clown or hair.) The child who taped it closest to its appropriate place won a small prize. Much merriment surrounded the dizzy child failing to even attach the tail anywhere near the target. Usually there were two other games of the mother’s choosing. Each game had one prize, so three children left the party with a prize.

Contemporary children’s birthday parties are big business. Our local grocery store features a free booklet with party locations, party entertainment and party food. Each child is supposed to leave the party with a “goody bag,” ensuring, I guess, that no child feels slighted. On the other hand, no child gets to win one of three prizes, something I always tried to do.

Fortunately, my daughter has held old fashioned birthday parties in the back yard with games such as running around and blowing bubbles. At one birthday party ten various aged kids spent their time digging a giant hole and leaping over and into it. Once again, it proves that kids make their own entertainment when given the chance. They still devour cake and ice cream! Some things never change.

A pizza restaurant near us hands each child a menu illustrated with several games and a small pack of crayons when we are seated. While the menus vary over time, “tic tac toe” always appears. It’s a simple game of each player alternating placing an x or an o in one of the nine open squares. The first player to get three in a row wins. One thing I have never done is preplan any strategy. This makes me an easy mark for my grandchildren who have figured out who needs to go first and what mark to make to win nearly every time. Their glee delights me.

Another favorite pencil game, “Hangman” is still just as enjoyable as it was years ago when I played it on rainy days at school. The first player thinks of a word and draws an appropriate number of blank spaces to accommodate it. The other player guesses which letters appear in the word. If she is right, the space is filled in(see above for letters “a” and “n.”) If wrong, a piece of the hanging man is added to the noose. Ideally the word is guessed before the complete “hanged man” dangles from the rope. Clearly the more minimal the man, the fewer turns are available before losing out to the rope. When I played my granddaughter at a younger age, I had a very elaborate stick figure with eyes, ears and toes to allow her enough chances to win. Now we stick to just head, arms and legs.

I am always glad for the restaurants which give us some fun things to do while waiting for our food. These word hunts, mazes and tic tac toe games make the arrival of the meals almost secondary. And no one is likely to look at her phone.

My late sister Patsy was born, two weeks late, on January 26, 1953. I was five, so I was very entranced by her arrival into our family. She was the most cheerful of the four of us, born smiling and smiling broadly as death approached. I can hear her laughter sometimes in my mind when I think of her.

Grief is a strange companion. I cruise along for a while and then get hit with it. This time it showed up when I was wondering what to get her for her birthday. After Christmas, I always started putting together an array of big and little presents to send her. I was stopped in my tracks by the reality that I didn’t need to be on the lookout for the tender faith based things she treasured.

When my granddaughter was four, she turned to me in a matter of fact way and said “You are going to leave here first because you got here first.” I always thought of my sister that way too. She was going to outlive me because I had a five year head start on her. It seemed reasonable that we would enjoy the same length of life. As anyone who has lost a younger family member knows, it doesn’t work that way.

Happy Birthday Kid.

In June 1963, my mother drove the four of us, now 16, 13, 10 and 8 across the United States from Portland to Buffalo, New York. She was the only one old enough to drive(I didn’t get my license for two more years) and did all the driving herself. We drove in a Ford station wagon with a luggage rack on the top. The car had a bench front seat, a bench middle seat and a flat “way-back” covered with pillows and sleeping bags. Each seat had its advantages and disadvantages. It won’t surprise any of my readers to know that we almost always wanted to be in the part of the car that we weren’t currently in.

The picture above was taken from the “way back” of the car when we were driving through Yellowstone National Park. My mother tried to hit interesting spots on the way, though her idea of interesting and ours rarely coincided. We did all enjoy Yellowstone, however. “Craters of the Moon,” a must stop for her was tolerated only if she agreed to stop at the endlessly advertised Wall Drug Store.

The drive covered over 2600 miles and took us six days to cross the country. To say that we were bored and often cranky is putting a kind face on things. But we did end up playing several car games as we went. One favorite was the license plate hunt. Each of us tried to be the first to spot a license plate from another state. Wall Drug Store parking lot actually was a gold mine of various plates. With the exception of Hawaii and Alaska, by the time our trip was over, we had seen plates from every state, keeping track on a piece of paper.

The other game was the Alphabet Hunt. Here we each looked for the letters of the alphabet in order from a to z. Each of us kept our own tally and could not count a letter found by a sibling. Billboards were abundant in those days, but it still took many hours to find the complete set. It was frustrating to spot a “q” when I was only up to “e” in the search. But we actually kept to our rules and out of trouble for a while.

My mother played her own game. She would announce a mileage on the odometer and state that no one was to speak until that mileage was reached. Never have numbers turned over more slowly than those times. I am sure she wondered countless times why we hadn’t just gone by train as in previous visits East!

In late summer when everything we could think of to do we had done, my brother and I were always up for an invented game, Counting Cars. Our house lay below a main road and a fence marked the division between our driveway entrance and the highway. Here my brother and I would plunk ourselves down and begin our game. First we each chose a color of car and then we proceeded to count the number of cars of that color that went by. We were often torn between picking a color we liked(blue in my case) or a color that was more typical(green in most years.) Sometimes we went with the one we liked even as we suspected we might lose. Sometimes we argued over whether a car was our chosen color or not. (Anyone who grew up with siblings knows that a lot of time is taken up squabbling over such trivia!) Eventually we would tire of the game and hope dinner was ready.

I taught this game to my grandchildren one hot summer evening. Although the road in front of our house has enough cars to count, they come by less often than on my childhood highway. My grandson immediately came up with a variant on my rules. Since we live near a corner, he decided we needed to guess what color of car would round the corner. He usually chose black, and he was usually right. We ended up laughing and literally rolling around on the front lawn together.

Who says kids died of boredom? We never did, since we were always ready to invent yet another way to pass the time. It certainly beat letting our mother–always ready with a needed household chore-know we were at loose ends!

As I aged, I have noticed a decline in my ability to balance. Apparently this is a natural occurrence leading  to many falls in older people. So working to improve my balance requires effort. Lately I have incorporated a tip I learned from the New York Times 30 Day Wellness Challenge which has been running this month. It suggests standing on one foot for half of the time while brushing my teeth, then standing on the other foot for the other half. I use an electric toothbrush which beeps in 30 second intervals, so it is easy to measure my time on each foot. The thing beeps four times, allowing me one full minute of balancing on each foot. In a short time my balance has markedly improved. But partly it is because I remembered a tip I learned as a kid.

A train track belonging to a spur line of the railroad ran below our property. Because the train ran only twice a day, the tracks were empty most of the time. My brother and I spent time trying to see who could stay balanced walking on the rails the longest. Our distances improved after our father came along and taught us his method. “Never look at your feet. Always look at a point down the track and trust that your feet will move along the rail.” As I brush my teeth, I look across into the next room and balance for a longer time than if I look down.

But although the tip applied to balancing on the rail, it seems a good thing to remember in lots of situations. I think it would be helpful advice for cellphone users who are always bumping into me while they are looking down!