I have not had many lovers in my life. What is it that another person does that conveys love to me. Can I only feel love in one way? Has each of these lovers conveyed love to me in the same way? Did I show love in the same way or does each love present a new challenge of love to be taken?
None of my lovers have any shared similarities except they were all artists of some kind. They have not had a similar look, nor a similar income. They have not been the same race nor have they shared physical attributes. And none of them have conveyed their love to me in the same way.
Each of my relationships has had a moment in time when I knew I was loved; when I've felt loved. I knew P for possibly four years before we became intimate. We were traveling on a bus from San Francisco headed to Ashland, Oregon. It was winter and I was 17. P and I are both from New York though we did not meet there. I was with him because he had heard I was in a marriage that I didn't wish to be in and out of the blue he called to ask if I wanted to go to his home in Ashland and begin a new life. We were on the bus that evening. That gesture alone could very well be called love, and it was, but I didn't feel love from him or for him in that gesture. I felt close, I felt thankful, but I did not feel loved. Ever since I'd met P four years earlier he had pretty much followed me around, too shy to talk to me, but always there when I turned around. The only thing he could think of to say was: Moira with a M, Moira with an O, Moira with an I, Moira with an R, Moira with an A. He had the most beautiful shiny black curly hair and a stare that bordered on maniacal.
When we arrived in Ashland, in the dead of night, we climbed the stairs to his apartment to get some sleep. The apartment was freezing. So cold that I got into bed with my coat on and despite the numerous blankets it was still cold. P then went to his closet and in shifts took out every piece of clothing he owned and dumped it on top of me. In that moment I began to laugh and with each bundle he arrived with I laughed harder as I watched him in all seriousness work at keeping me warm. Then he jumped into bed beside me, put his arms around me and in that moment, I felt loved. I knew I was loved. P and I remember that night every so often and we laugh about it. For me, I conjure this moment all these years later and it constantly reminds me of my love for him. It is the moment that remains long after we have parted, and it is the moment that never goes away. P is a writer.
The moment when you feel loved, for me, is the moment you truly relax with someone. They do something that changes the air between you and gives you a deeper understanding of who they are. You look at this man differently. You know they are different. You know their love is solely for you and that moment binds you to one another in such a way that even if you part, the love remains.
When I was 21 I met J. I had never seen anyone so beautiful in my life. I was mad for him. Looking back I would say I was in lust. We have absolutely nothing in common yet we had real fun together. Once we made an entire book, reviewing wine we had bought. We pasted the labels into a book and wrote a critique of each wine we'd bought trying to sound as stuffy but as truthful a possible. Once when he thought he would never see me again, he wrote the address of his parents house in a book I had, and I found it years later, and was actually able to go visit him when I no longer had his current contact information. Another time, when he asked to walk with me a bit after my work, he did so, through an ice storm and stayed with me all the way to my door about two miles away. I maintain the friendship because we have known each other for 40 years, come from the same neck of the woods in New York, and because he's a nice guy. J is a painter. In all those 40 years I never had a moment of genuine deep love for him until I saw him last year. While staying at his home he began to bring out various pictures and art pieces that I had created and given him. Things I didn't remember. He had a small ton of stuff that I had given to him, and it was all in pristine shape as though I had handed it to him yesterday. Incredulously I asked him: Why in the world had he kept that stuff? And he said: Because I love you, Moira. When he said this I had to go back mentally through all the years we had known one another. All the things that had previously annoyed me I now saw in a different light. He had kept the same job for 30 years, he always dressed the same, he had the same bicycle, if you called him up in 2012 he was doing the same thing as when you called him in 1990. The script never changed. And suddenly, all those steadfast boring attributes were applicable to me. I had been a constant too, and I felt loved and suddenly this man looked differently to me and I loved him in a way I had never felt before.
PW is a water colorist & cryptologist. And I have never loved anyone the way I love PW. He is not better than any one of my other lovers he's just a master at loving me. He is very New York in the way he loves me. And I love him. Deeply. I like old school love. I do have a preference for that. I respond to it like a kitten to milk. I detest men that say things like: No. You go change the oil in your car!
What is it? Men who rush to your aid when you have fallen in the street. Men who get the door for you, men who don't necessarily drive, but when you need to go home they hand money to the cab driver so you don't have to think about, (it makes a huge difference if he hands it to me or the cab driver); by either asking for money or checking your own purse. Men who see you struggling with groceries or luggage and run over to help you. All of that and you don't even have to be cute. PW is all of that. But he does something special for me. He knows that when I am worried I need to talk. He lets me talk for hours. Hours. And here it is: He never says a word to interrupt me. He knows that all it is, is that I need to talk out loud. I'm not looking for advice or an opinion. And when I am done he says: I know you will figure it out. He always brings the wine and I always make the food. I know there will always be a bottle of wine in his bag and he knows he will be fed. You never have to ask PW for anything, he knows. He is in his eighties now and when we talk he still has that power of his love over me. This quality in him I adore. When I first began dating PW he lived on The Bowery. In the mornings, because he didn't cook, he would go out and get coffee and ham and egg buns from the Chinese. He's never asked me once what I wanted. He knows. He is the first man that called me: Dramatic. I laughed. I asked him if that was a bad thing or a good thing and he said: It just is. He found it charming. Others aren't so sure. PW also finds me funny, and when I make him laugh, which I try to do often, he throws his head back and laughs with tears in his eyes. I feel loved when he laughs because of me.
E was an unusual lover. He was the first bi-racial man I had ever met that was my age. I was dating a German man, C, who I had my heart set on. I threw a party and invited about 30 people, all single, looking to fall in love. My father came too. Because my father spoke German I thought he and C would get along. My father didn't even remember C a day later when he called to chat. He remembered E and encouraged me to get to know him. I did so thinking: what could it hurt to look at the man your father liked? And that is how I came to know E. When you are bi-racial you will go through life spending a good deal of time trying to explain yourself to others. You are constantly having to explain your racial makeup, why you know what you know, why you went to private school, and all the time you are being grilled you know that eventually you will be posed with a question that will finally allow the person to put your squarely back into The Black Box. E and I loved one another for the same reason: We never had to explain ourselves to each other. Though E was Jewish he and I shared a remarkably similar life. He went to a Quaker school, I attended New Lincoln. His mother was involved with the communist party, mine The Catholic Worker, Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson were singers and activists we both knew. Nothing he shared with me was a mystery and that alone made me feel I was at home when I was with E. E was one of the best programmers in The US at the time having written code, that had him sitting pretty. But what was it that made me love him? He took care of me, he saw me through an undergraduate degree, I lived in a nice house, he left each day for work leaving me money, but that wasn't it. One day, after having saved all the money he'd left on the day to day, I asked him if I could use it to buy a coat. He was shocked that I hadn't spent the money after all these months. I can't explain why I felt so nervous asking this question, but I was. He said: Don't you have a coat? That question made me even more nervous. I said: Yes. And I went to show him my coat. I can still see this coat. Years before I had gotten, from a second hand store, a beautiful coat, that I had hand sewn in a designer label from elsewhere, and over the years I had patched it. Patched it until it couldn't be patched any longer. I had never had a brand new coat in all the years since I was a child living at home with my parents. E said to me: Go buy a coat and whatever else you need. You don't have to save this daily money for that, buy what you need. No one had ever said anything to me like that, especially around money, and I was in tears due to his generosity. He displayed a kindness, with my feeling so anxious about asking, that I have never encountered before or since. He knew the power of having something new. In my relationship with E, who had the financial means, I knew what it meant to be loved by having what I needed taken care of. He on the other hand had never been with a woman that took care of his needs. He worked long hours, easily gone for 12 or more hours and in exchange he didn't have to do a thing. Lunch was made, dinner was made, laundry done, clothes mended, house kept, shopping done and he felt very loved by my creating and making meals that he thought were only to be had in a restaurant. He used to bitch all the time about the cost of lobster bisque so we made it at home and he declared after that he would never complain again. Our first date he took me to eat lobster at the nicest place he knew and when I was unimpressed I took him to Prince Edward Island during lobster season where my friend, a lobster fisherman, handed E a bag full of still warm lobsters cooked on the boat to eat. I will always remember his face and what he said as he gobbled and sucked on that lobster. He said: Now I know why you weren't impressed with that restaurant. What was I thinking? E is a good man and I think about him often.
I had known C for a good twenty years. He had been married to a childhood friend. And then she died. All those years C had flirted and made me laugh. He said the most absurd things imaginable, and his humour struck my funny bone deeply. When I wanted to murder him the most he would say something or make a face that would render me laughing and no longer upset. But C was also the first man that made me feel loved sexually. When we were in bed he made me beautiful. He satisfied me every which way including Sunday. C is an artist.
I've been married twice and neither of those men can I say I loved nor were there moments when I felt their love.
I cherish my lovers because they have been men that saw my soul and nurtured me. I think I have done the same for them but that is in their hands to say.
None of my lovers have any shared similarities except they were all artists of some kind. They have not had a similar look, nor a similar income. They have not been the same race nor have they shared physical attributes. And none of them have conveyed their love to me in the same way.
Each of my relationships has had a moment in time when I knew I was loved; when I've felt loved. I knew P for possibly four years before we became intimate. We were traveling on a bus from San Francisco headed to Ashland, Oregon. It was winter and I was 17. P and I are both from New York though we did not meet there. I was with him because he had heard I was in a marriage that I didn't wish to be in and out of the blue he called to ask if I wanted to go to his home in Ashland and begin a new life. We were on the bus that evening. That gesture alone could very well be called love, and it was, but I didn't feel love from him or for him in that gesture. I felt close, I felt thankful, but I did not feel loved. Ever since I'd met P four years earlier he had pretty much followed me around, too shy to talk to me, but always there when I turned around. The only thing he could think of to say was: Moira with a M, Moira with an O, Moira with an I, Moira with an R, Moira with an A. He had the most beautiful shiny black curly hair and a stare that bordered on maniacal.
When we arrived in Ashland, in the dead of night, we climbed the stairs to his apartment to get some sleep. The apartment was freezing. So cold that I got into bed with my coat on and despite the numerous blankets it was still cold. P then went to his closet and in shifts took out every piece of clothing he owned and dumped it on top of me. In that moment I began to laugh and with each bundle he arrived with I laughed harder as I watched him in all seriousness work at keeping me warm. Then he jumped into bed beside me, put his arms around me and in that moment, I felt loved. I knew I was loved. P and I remember that night every so often and we laugh about it. For me, I conjure this moment all these years later and it constantly reminds me of my love for him. It is the moment that remains long after we have parted, and it is the moment that never goes away. P is a writer.
The moment when you feel loved, for me, is the moment you truly relax with someone. They do something that changes the air between you and gives you a deeper understanding of who they are. You look at this man differently. You know they are different. You know their love is solely for you and that moment binds you to one another in such a way that even if you part, the love remains.
When I was 21 I met J. I had never seen anyone so beautiful in my life. I was mad for him. Looking back I would say I was in lust. We have absolutely nothing in common yet we had real fun together. Once we made an entire book, reviewing wine we had bought. We pasted the labels into a book and wrote a critique of each wine we'd bought trying to sound as stuffy but as truthful a possible. Once when he thought he would never see me again, he wrote the address of his parents house in a book I had, and I found it years later, and was actually able to go visit him when I no longer had his current contact information. Another time, when he asked to walk with me a bit after my work, he did so, through an ice storm and stayed with me all the way to my door about two miles away. I maintain the friendship because we have known each other for 40 years, come from the same neck of the woods in New York, and because he's a nice guy. J is a painter. In all those 40 years I never had a moment of genuine deep love for him until I saw him last year. While staying at his home he began to bring out various pictures and art pieces that I had created and given him. Things I didn't remember. He had a small ton of stuff that I had given to him, and it was all in pristine shape as though I had handed it to him yesterday. Incredulously I asked him: Why in the world had he kept that stuff? And he said: Because I love you, Moira. When he said this I had to go back mentally through all the years we had known one another. All the things that had previously annoyed me I now saw in a different light. He had kept the same job for 30 years, he always dressed the same, he had the same bicycle, if you called him up in 2012 he was doing the same thing as when you called him in 1990. The script never changed. And suddenly, all those steadfast boring attributes were applicable to me. I had been a constant too, and I felt loved and suddenly this man looked differently to me and I loved him in a way I had never felt before.
PW is a water colorist & cryptologist. And I have never loved anyone the way I love PW. He is not better than any one of my other lovers he's just a master at loving me. He is very New York in the way he loves me. And I love him. Deeply. I like old school love. I do have a preference for that. I respond to it like a kitten to milk. I detest men that say things like: No. You go change the oil in your car!
What is it? Men who rush to your aid when you have fallen in the street. Men who get the door for you, men who don't necessarily drive, but when you need to go home they hand money to the cab driver so you don't have to think about, (it makes a huge difference if he hands it to me or the cab driver); by either asking for money or checking your own purse. Men who see you struggling with groceries or luggage and run over to help you. All of that and you don't even have to be cute. PW is all of that. But he does something special for me. He knows that when I am worried I need to talk. He lets me talk for hours. Hours. And here it is: He never says a word to interrupt me. He knows that all it is, is that I need to talk out loud. I'm not looking for advice or an opinion. And when I am done he says: I know you will figure it out. He always brings the wine and I always make the food. I know there will always be a bottle of wine in his bag and he knows he will be fed. You never have to ask PW for anything, he knows. He is in his eighties now and when we talk he still has that power of his love over me. This quality in him I adore. When I first began dating PW he lived on The Bowery. In the mornings, because he didn't cook, he would go out and get coffee and ham and egg buns from the Chinese. He's never asked me once what I wanted. He knows. He is the first man that called me: Dramatic. I laughed. I asked him if that was a bad thing or a good thing and he said: It just is. He found it charming. Others aren't so sure. PW also finds me funny, and when I make him laugh, which I try to do often, he throws his head back and laughs with tears in his eyes. I feel loved when he laughs because of me.
E was an unusual lover. He was the first bi-racial man I had ever met that was my age. I was dating a German man, C, who I had my heart set on. I threw a party and invited about 30 people, all single, looking to fall in love. My father came too. Because my father spoke German I thought he and C would get along. My father didn't even remember C a day later when he called to chat. He remembered E and encouraged me to get to know him. I did so thinking: what could it hurt to look at the man your father liked? And that is how I came to know E. When you are bi-racial you will go through life spending a good deal of time trying to explain yourself to others. You are constantly having to explain your racial makeup, why you know what you know, why you went to private school, and all the time you are being grilled you know that eventually you will be posed with a question that will finally allow the person to put your squarely back into The Black Box. E and I loved one another for the same reason: We never had to explain ourselves to each other. Though E was Jewish he and I shared a remarkably similar life. He went to a Quaker school, I attended New Lincoln. His mother was involved with the communist party, mine The Catholic Worker, Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson were singers and activists we both knew. Nothing he shared with me was a mystery and that alone made me feel I was at home when I was with E. E was one of the best programmers in The US at the time having written code, that had him sitting pretty. But what was it that made me love him? He took care of me, he saw me through an undergraduate degree, I lived in a nice house, he left each day for work leaving me money, but that wasn't it. One day, after having saved all the money he'd left on the day to day, I asked him if I could use it to buy a coat. He was shocked that I hadn't spent the money after all these months. I can't explain why I felt so nervous asking this question, but I was. He said: Don't you have a coat? That question made me even more nervous. I said: Yes. And I went to show him my coat. I can still see this coat. Years before I had gotten, from a second hand store, a beautiful coat, that I had hand sewn in a designer label from elsewhere, and over the years I had patched it. Patched it until it couldn't be patched any longer. I had never had a brand new coat in all the years since I was a child living at home with my parents. E said to me: Go buy a coat and whatever else you need. You don't have to save this daily money for that, buy what you need. No one had ever said anything to me like that, especially around money, and I was in tears due to his generosity. He displayed a kindness, with my feeling so anxious about asking, that I have never encountered before or since. He knew the power of having something new. In my relationship with E, who had the financial means, I knew what it meant to be loved by having what I needed taken care of. He on the other hand had never been with a woman that took care of his needs. He worked long hours, easily gone for 12 or more hours and in exchange he didn't have to do a thing. Lunch was made, dinner was made, laundry done, clothes mended, house kept, shopping done and he felt very loved by my creating and making meals that he thought were only to be had in a restaurant. He used to bitch all the time about the cost of lobster bisque so we made it at home and he declared after that he would never complain again. Our first date he took me to eat lobster at the nicest place he knew and when I was unimpressed I took him to Prince Edward Island during lobster season where my friend, a lobster fisherman, handed E a bag full of still warm lobsters cooked on the boat to eat. I will always remember his face and what he said as he gobbled and sucked on that lobster. He said: Now I know why you weren't impressed with that restaurant. What was I thinking? E is a good man and I think about him often.
I had known C for a good twenty years. He had been married to a childhood friend. And then she died. All those years C had flirted and made me laugh. He said the most absurd things imaginable, and his humour struck my funny bone deeply. When I wanted to murder him the most he would say something or make a face that would render me laughing and no longer upset. But C was also the first man that made me feel loved sexually. When we were in bed he made me beautiful. He satisfied me every which way including Sunday. C is an artist.
I've been married twice and neither of those men can I say I loved nor were there moments when I felt their love.
I cherish my lovers because they have been men that saw my soul and nurtured me. I think I have done the same for them but that is in their hands to say.
Comments