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When love in capital letters comes knocking at your door

Your whole life, all you hear about is romantic love. It’s the stuff of fairy tales when you’re young, and poetry when you’re older, and six-handkerchief movies, paperback novels, and Lifetime TV, now and forever.

A kiss from a beloved awakens not just a sleeping princess, but everyone under love’s spell. This is what we are told and so we wait for that kiss. And we anticipate.

But there’s another kind of love that’s every bit as poetic and magical. But it’s kept under wraps. You don’t hear about in song after song or see it acted out in movies. Even poets who wax on about everything seldom wax on about this. And even on Valentine’s Day, when all love is celebrated, this love is ignored.

It comes to a person later in life, and it’s a surprise, a shock, LOVE in capital letters suddenly on your front stoop, knock, knock, knocking at your door.

Okay, cooing.

Okay, bawling.

Okay, just lying quietly in your daughter’s arms.

Hello. Remember me? it says. Remember waking up smiling every day, eager for the day? Remember counting the hours until you and the one you love meet? Remember sitting on a couch holding hands, looking into each other’s eyes, just hanging out and doing nothing? And being happy doing nothing?

And remember knowing beyond a doubt that no one on earth had ever loved this way before?

Your child has a child, adopts a child, marries a person with a child, and this happens again. Suddenly you are head over heels, wildly and madly in LOVE! A baby. A 2-year-old. A 10-year-old. It doesn’t matter. You wake up smiling. You’re eager for the day. You count the weeks, days, hours until you can be with this child. You sit on a couch and watch TV or read books or play a game and you’re happy. You’re happy hanging out. You’re happy doing nothing. You’re happy simply because this child exists.

And you know beyond a doubt that this is a love like no one has ever known. It’s a wildflower you just discovered, a bird whose song is only now being sung. A new species. A whole new world.

“Backward, turn backward, O Time in thy flight
Make me a child again, just for tonight…”

A grandchild does this. Years melt away and it doesn’t matter what the calendar says because here you are with a baby in your arms or a child by your side and you don’t feel old anymore. You feel vital and happy and useful. You feel young again.

Love does this every time. It awakens you and leads you to places you didn’t even know existed.

But why don’t we know about this grand love? Where are the books and television shows and sonnets and rhymes?

Even before Lucy, my first grandbaby was born, I loved her. “The mere idea of you, the longing here for you,” I sang in the shower, in the car, while I was cooking, all the time.

She came knocking from the womb. She had my heart even before she took her first breath.

The others had to knock a little harder because I was so smitten with her that it took me a while to hear them at my door. But here we are now, four children and a "Mimi" and I think, what did I do before they came along? What was important? How did I exist without them?

These are the same questions all love asks. How did I exist? What did I do?

Maybe the poets don’t write about this grandest of love because who would believe them? Maybe it’s unimaginable, like heaven, like eternity.

Lucy is walking to my door now. I see her from my window, holding her mother’s hand.

“Mimi!” she shouts and then comes running.

I bend down and hug her and help her unzip her jacket and then, holding hands, we head for the family room where we read Bear Snores On.

Lucy likes it when the bear snores and sneezes. And so I snore and I sneeze again and again and again.

“More,” Lucy says after I’ve sneezed 100 times.

“You want MORE sneezes!?”

And she laughs and nods and I sneeze and I snore some more.

And life is good. Life is perfect, because Lucy makes it perfect. Perfect love sitting by my side.

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