"You Don't Know What Love Is"

For Rebecca Feldman and Brian Roessler That's what the first line says of the song I've been playing all summer at the keyboard—trying to get my hands around its dark, melancholy chords, its story line of a melody that twists up like snakes from melodic minor scales that I've also been trying to learn, though I'm no great shakes as a practicer of scales. Come to think of it, neither am I much when it comes to love—no great shakes, I mean. Not that I haven't had my chances. Twenty years married, I made a lousy husband, half asleep, selfish, more like a big baby than a grown man, the poet laureate of the self-induced coma when it came to doing anything for anybody but me. "Now and then he took his thumb out of his mouth to write an ode to or a haiku about the thumb he sucked all day." That's what I imagined my ex-wife said to our therapist near the end. She did say: "It's all about Bill." She was right. And suddenly it frightens me, remembering how, at our wedding, our poet friends read poems of (mostly) utter depression to salute us. I wondered if their griefs in love had double-crossed our union, if strange snakes in the grass of our blissful Eden had hissed at us, and now I worry, on your wedding day, if I'm not doing the same damned thing . . . . I haven't come to spring up and put my curse on your bliss. Here's what I want to say: You're young. You don’t know what love is. And as the next line of the song goes, you won't —"Until you know the meaning of the blues." Darlings, the blues will come (though not often, I hope) to raise their fiery swords against your paradise. A little of that you unwittingly got today, when it rained and you couldn't be married outside under the beautiful tree in Nan and Alan's yard. But paradise doesn't have to be structured so that we can never reenter it. After you've kicked each other out of it once or twice (I'm speaking metaphorically, of course), teach yourself how to say a few kind words to each other. Don't stand there angry, stony. Each of you let the other know what you are feeling and thinking and then it may be possible to return to each other smiling, hand in hand. For arm in arm, you are your best Eden. Remember the advice the old poet sang to you on the afternoon of August 4, 2001, the day you got married. May you enjoy a good laugh thinking of him and his silver thumb now that you've turned the key into your new life in the beautiful Massachusetts rain and—hey, now—sun!