The Making of a Love Story

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26 Responses

  1. ScarletNumbers says:

    Like the children on “How I Met Your Mother,” they want to know.

    Judging from their facial expressions, I don’t think that’s the case.Report

  2. zic says:

    I’ve never seen an episode of How I met Your Mother, and it wasn’t a TV show when my offspring were children, yet they loved our meeting and courtship stories. These include many post-gig pizzas and a particular pizza joint, and even though the pizza is of questionable quality, even though we’ve a gourmet pizza cook in the house, every trip to Boston by any member of the family includes, if possible, a visit to Little Stevie’s House of Pizza. It’s a tribute to family; and though stories frequently get the, “Not again!” response, they are treasured; those trips for pizza prove this to me.

    My husband and I knew each other for a summer, and then had a school-year of separation. At the time, phone calls were not so easy (dorm phones) and they were expensive. There was no internet, no cell phones. So we wrote letters.

    It’s an incredible way to get to know someone; to learn the intricacies of their thoughts and the geography of their morals. William Zinsser, in his book Writing to Learn explores how writing makes us organize our thoughts and enhances learning. Writing to a stranger who becomes a friend, I suspect, helps us organize ourselves, know ourselves better, for it happens in the privacy of our own minds, not in the peer pressure of relating live. Our modern communication doesn’t really do this as well; it’s more immediate, and the time to present yourself as you do when you write is missing, the time to ponder as you read missing. I celebrate the sense of equality young people have now, but I mourn the loss of contemplative time in their lives, too.

    I hope your family story encourages your daughters to be letter writers; I hope your parents decide to share those letters with them to that end.Report

    • Johanley in reply to zic says:

      @zic thank you for sharing. There is something lovely about writing. It is so much more deliberate and thoughtful. I do hope someday to be able to read the letters my parents wrote to one another. My children do write quite a bit and share stories with their peers. Although it is online, they are still navigating communication via the written word and they have friends across the world with whom they have become friends based soley upon reading one another’s stories.Report