Lenten reflection - what's in a gaze?

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Lenten reflection - what's in a gaze?

Have you ever met or talked with someone and the way they look at you is profoundly different?  I remember my very first day with my wife, Joanne.  We went to dinner and the movies and had really nice time with conversation was easy.  Afterward, I drove her home, and we stood outside of her apartment in a two-family house on a quiet street in Watertown, Massachusetts.  It was one of those beautiful late summer evenings but what I remember most was that look in Joanne’s eyes when we kissed under a moonlit sky.  It was a gaze that stopped my world and told me that she was nowhere but in that moment with me.  I was thinking that it was far too early to be a look of love but it was a gaze that looked deeper than just into my eyes only and gave me a feeling I will never forget, as it sits front and center in my memory file and my heart.  When I recall that moment with Joanne, I call it “the look”, but it was much more than that to me.

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What is love?

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What is love?

What is love?  A good question for St. Valentine’s Day, but I am not sure the Roxbury Guys from Saturday Night Live would really be the right ones to ask.  The dictionary defines love as “an intense feeling or deep affection” or to “feel deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone.”  Wikipedia says, “Love is a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes that ranges from interpersonal affection to pleasure.  It can refer to an emotion of a strong attraction and personal attachment.”  While those definitions point to the intense high we can feel when beginning a romantic relationship, something seems missing when you think about the depth of what love is really all about.  On a day where men and woman are either searching for someone to love, trying to hold on to that feeling of love they once had, or wondering if they will never have that love that will last, it may not be bad idea to understand how we think of love.

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Christmas - what's it all about?

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Christmas - what's it all about?

My wife and I bought our starter house, a small Cape, when we got married.  We are still in our “starter” house because it became home as we fixed it up, started our journey of life as a couple, raised our daughters, and now sit here in the sun room we added years ago, watching the snow blanket the neighborhood just one week before Christmas.  Our family has grown up celebrating and enjoying each of the holidays the calendar brings, but I think it would be a unanimous vote that the Christmas season is the favorite.  We were reminiscing about an overnight trip we took with the girls to Portsmouth, New Hampshire during a snow storm to visit the living history village of Strawberry Banke during the Christmas season.  As our small car slipped and slid its way up Route 95, we were all questioning our sanity, but once we finally reached our destination and watched the saucer-like snowflakes (we have only seen in Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer and the movie Elf) gently fall outside the restaurant we were now cozied up in, it was more than worth the journey.  It felt like Christmas and we were together to enjoy it.

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Can't Buy Me Love

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Can't Buy Me Love

When I was a young kid growing up in Lynn, Massachusetts, I probably didn't realize it but it was one of the poorer cities in the state.  I was eight years old and I can remember walking over to the record store on Market Street to buy my first record, Can't Buy Me Love.  As much of a Beatles fan as I was, who would have thought that they would have gotten me thinking about my priorities in life?  (Of course, my older brother gave me a hard time a few years later for getting Johnny Cash’s A Boy Names Sue over the Rolling Stone’s Honky Tonk Woman – so I can’t say I my musical taste was overly discerning. )  I probably bought Can’t Buy Me Love because I thought the song was fun but there was something about the lyrics of the song that did hit home though, even in those early years.

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