Here’s an example.

I’m working at Macy’s this summer and as I’m wandering around the handbags on a sleepy Saturday morning, this woman wanders into the department.  She is older, perhaps late seventies, with a crown of gray curls.  Her lips are painted bright red and are smudged around the corners.  She hobbles when she walks.

I greet her, as I’m trained to do, with a falsely cheerful, “How’re you today?  Can I help you find anything?”

She smiles back with those bright red lips.  “Nah,” she says.  “I’m just looking.”

“Let me know if you need anything,” I reply and start to turn away. 

Then, out of the blue, she says, “You know I just had the funniest conversation with that nice girl over in women’s clothing.” 

“Oh, yeah?” I asked but I’m not really interested.  It is 10 AM and all I really care about is taking a fifteen so I can find a Frappucino.

“Yup, says she’s getting married in a couple months,” the lady says and nods to herself.  “And I told her, I said, I was in the navy for the longest time and that’s where I met my husband.  Met and married in six months, that’s right.  And all the young girls used to ask me, when I was the ripe old age of twenty-nine how they’d know when they found the right man.  And I’d just say, honey, you’ll know when it’s right.  It’ll be enough if you just know.  You’ll feel it.  And I’ve been married fifty years now.  I surely have.”

“Wow, fifty years,” I echo and my brain doesn’t really process this until she’s bought a frumpy Nine West bag and is hobbling off toward the jewelry department. 

Fifty years.  That is a really long time.  It’s a life time.  That is the kind of marriage we all hope for.  It’s the kind of marriage that makes us hope that, even with today’s astronomical divorce rates, there is hope.  And you know, at first I find myself balking at the idea of meeting someone and marrying so quickly.  But here’s this lady, married in six months and happily married for fifty years.  She must have done something right. 

That, my friends, is what I’d call a happy ending.

Maybe I should rephrase that.  Of course love exists.  We love our friends, we love our family, we love our jobs (well, some of us) and we love waking up in the morning to bright sunlight on our faces.  We love the bitter cold of ice cream in summer and the silent sound of snowfall in winter.    We love sports and cars and some people even love their breakfast cereal.   But what about this whole “falling in love thing?”  Of course it’s real.  One hundred percent, certifiably, make-you-do-some-really-dumb-shit real.  It happens to the best of us. 

The truth is that we all fall in love at some point in our lives.   And sometimes we don’t even really have control over it.  Why else would you have fallen in love with that studmuffin from accounting, despite yours and your mothers better judgment, knowing that he had a track record of throwing away girls like yesterday’s stinky garbage which he did, in fact, do to you, despite the fact that you swore love would prevail because you were different.  You know it as well as I do: sometimes love just doesn’t make sense.  Sometimes it simply defies all logic.   

So what is love exactly?   And I’m not talking about the love you see in movies or in books or hear about in songs.  I’m talking about love in real life.  What makes us fall in love?  How do we know we are in love?   And how do we know when puppy love is different from the coveted “true love?”   And then there’s my favorite question: will we know it at first sight?

My answer: oh, hell no.  It surely doesn’t happen at first sight.  I think we can put that in a list with other things like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.  We might pretend it exists, but it just doesn’t.  We all want to think that our desperate searches for love will end when we see a cute young fellow across the room, look into his gorgeous eyes and we know from the proverbial depths of our soul that he is the One .  It’s cute and Romantic.  You might even say it’s comforting to think finding “true” love is that easy.  But let’s face it, if you’re attracted to someone solely on their looks, that’s lust, not love.  And I have a hard time believing that you could possibly know, upon first glance at a person, that your personalities will be compatible.  You could think, “wow, he’s cute, I think it must be love at first sight,” but then he goes and opens his mouth and reveals to you, and the world, that he is a complete and irrevocable idiot.  See what I mean?

 Love can’t possibly happen at first sight because love, real love, is so much more than that.  Love is compromising when you want to watch the ball game and your significant other wants you to do the laundry you should have done a month ago.  Love has to be based on compatibility because who else would stay up until three in the morning talking to you about spaghetti noodles?   And when you’re really in love, you stick it out even though it might be pouring down rain and the basement’s flooded and now the roof is leaking ad just when you think it couldn’t get any worse the power goes out and you realize you don’t have any flashlights. 

Love’s a complicated thing; it can’t be reduced to something like “at first sight.”  Sometimes love is mysterious.  You can’t explain why you love that goofball who works at the express lane at Kroger and you can’t explain why you don’t love the genius who sits in the cubicle next to you  and who could probably buy you a yacht if you wanted one.  But you love the goofball all the same and you’re happy. 

But you know, it’s because real love is so complicated that it’s so damn hard to find.  And the rarity of it, well, that’s what makes it so special.

So, I just finished My Sister’s Keeper.   It’s a brilliant novel, until you get to the end.  I don’t know about you, but I felt completely cheated in those last few chapters.  What on earth was Jodi Picoult thinking?

This whole novel centers around Anna Fitzgerald fighting to have control over her own life.  She finally gets it and in the end, she gets into a  freak car accident and dies.  That is a cheap ending if I ever read one.  It completely undermines what this novel is essentially about: freedom to control your own destiny.  So basically, we follow Anna for 400+ pages, sympathize with her struggles, and in the end it’s all for absolutely nothing.  Since Anna’s life is snuffed out by forces beyond her control, everything she fought for, and essentially the whole storyline of the novel, is pointless.  And the fact that Kate lives and defies the odds because she now has the blessing of her sister’s kidney, oh please.  It’s so sappy I can barely stand it. 

You know, for once in my life I actually like the ending of the movie version better.  Of course, I don’t like all of the movie, because there are a whole set of characters in the novel who aren’t even mentioned in the movie.  But at the end of the movie things are as they should be.  Kate dies, which of course is sad and tragic, but Anna gets a chance to have her own life.  Anna finally gets to be her own person and her mother, Sara, is finally able to let go. 

Is anyone as disappointed as I am?

And my cat has got to be the weirdest of weird.  I think she believes, somewhere in those deep, mysterious recesses of her mind, that she is, in fact, a dog.  I say this because she plays fetch and she is actually better at it than my dog.  All I have to do is throw a cat toy across the room, you know one of those colored balls with a bell inside, and she shoots across the room like she has nitroglycerin strapped to her feet.  After she’s pounced on it, tackled it, and shaken it a few times for good measure, she prances over to me and drops it right at my feet.  And then she sits, staring up at me, tailing twitching, waiting to do it all over again.   This could go on, literally, for a half an hour.  (And, just for the record, my dog will chase after a ball, but he’s too simple to understand that he actually needs to bring it back.)

My cat also has this strange fixation with water.  I used to keep plastic bowls on the floor for her, until she discovered that with a careless whack of a paw she can knock the whole thing over.  I then resorted to putting a large ceramic dog bowl on the floor, too heavy for her to knock over.  However, I’ll find her at random times during the day standing with all four paws on the edge of the bowl, balancing precariously.  She’ll stare down into it as if there is something utterly fascinating beneath the inch and half of water.  And then suddenly, out of nowhere, she’ll strike at the water like a snake.  Which only makes her loose her balance and fall right into the bowl.  She then emerges, shaking her paws as if to say, “what the hell did I do that for?” But then, of course, half an hour later, I’ll find her doing the same damn thing again. 

And, you know, I absolutely swear that she can talk.  When I wake up in the morning, the first thing she does when my feet hit the floor is meow.  At first it’s a cute and innocent meow, a pathetic, “please feed me.”  While I’m in the bathroom, I will hear her meows become more demanding.  And then, after I come back into the room, she will glare at me with accusing eyes, tail flicking like a whip, howling “feed me right now, bitch!” followed by a string of cursewords.  Trust me, you’d believe me if you heard her. 

 I’ve come to the conclusion that whoever believes animals don’t have personalities is dead wrong.

Well, here goes.