Bob Collins
Your daily dose of sweetness comes from WBUR in Boston today, where singer/songwriter Marcia Deihl pens a love story on the Cognosenti blog.
As Valentine’s Day approached, she reports, her mother found new love.
She did so at age 102.
It’s easy to entertain my friends with my stories about Pol, my centenarian mother. But I do not find this one “feisty” or “cute” or any of those other condescending terms that she hates. It’s a different sort of love that I see — so pure, so down-to-the-essence, so dear. It’s what they are, not what they do. It’s eros, not agape.
Later, Mother confided, “He’s a good kisser.” I think that was their first kiss, but even they might not know if it was. She just knows he’s her S.O., and he knows she’s his.
Here’s what else they do: They eat meals next to each other most days, and sometimes she wheels her chair into the day room where he has his “office” at a tray table. His business is to read the daily paper. He sometimes touches her arm, and word is that, on New Year’s Eve, they toasted with sparkling cider and danced the Charleston in their chairs.
They do not argue about money, politics or sex, and they don’t speak about their long marriages. They have short-term memory loss, and they also have what the gurus tell us is true enlightenment: being in the moment.
Deihl had already written and submitted her story when she got the news that her mom died three days after her birthday.
