The subject is love – my favorite "sit down before me child and listen to my tale" topic.
       "So what do I do now, Mary?" my contemporaries ask when befuddled by late arrivals of masculine attention.  Asking me – who has probably the worst taste in and the worst romantic outcomes with men imaginable, me who has scampered through love after love without any concept of longevity ever entering the makeup of the relationship  – it's me to whom they come for advice.  Start a project together, I say – you have his phone number, invite him to a concert or a play  – meet him at a movie -- make him a dinner.  Pretty lean advice, never having done any of the suggested come-ons  They want to be in love again, these contemporaries of mine. And I don’t blame them. They want to throw themselves into the turmoil of love again. They miss loving.
       So it is with love. So seductive. So necessary to stay vibrantly alive. I remember being in college with love hormones raging all around me. I tested the water – was pinned twice and engaged twice. Fun but no cigar.  Broke each off with a shrug of my shoulders and began to wonder as I started my career – a carefree professional when the correct posture was engaged, married, pregnant – was I ever going to fall in love – crazy, head-over-heels in love, bumping into walls love, riding past your el stop love, discounting everything else in life love, hands on, face to face love? Then I met The Man and did all the above including engagement, marriage, pregnancy times four and bam – when all those responsibilities were done with all I had was the memory of love.
       But having at least the latter, I wanted more because it is undoubtedly the best emotion in our quiver. So I went looking.  And I found it – with a womanizing art director, with a manic depressive James Joyce scholar, with a married banker, with a manipulating deceitful  pilot.  All bad, unreasonable but exciting choices. All of which ended at the point of realizing what damage I was doing to my selfhood. But as the love part flourished, vivid and fun, I would ride it until it became dangerous, then jump ship.
       So my advice to those of my ilk (other than beware of my advice) is go after love in any form. Plunge into it. Real down in the marrow of the bones love. If it turns out bad – no sweat. You will have tasted it and you will know you can feel it (the best part – knowing you can feel it). If it turns out bad – get out quick and clean. If it turns out bad, at least the experience was good. And there’s always the creating of a poem, or a book or a lyric or an oil painting to sooth away the sadness that it is over. (Even sadness is a worthwhile emotion.)
       Being in love does not have to be an eternal commitment. Nice if it is – and sometimes that happens – and sometimes you can talk yourself into it.  With that attitude, some of the fear can be removed and more of the enjoyment can be found.  So I end with this promise. Finding love does not end at 24 or 54 or 104.  Love seems to be a circuit that always needs a connection – one that can be plugged in and just as easily unplugged. If that sounds callous, it may be so, but only with that attitude would I have been willing to take the emotional chances I took – all with great intellectual, emotional, spiritual and psychic rewards.  If it is not here, it is there. Where the here is or where the there is I am not sure – but every 10 years or so there it is and I fall, always  ready to put myself back in the "there", always enjoying the experience. Always prepared for the ending. Always keeping alive the memories.