Jamaican and in love
I am a Jamaican, I love my people, and I am absolutely consumed with trying to determine what is the special glue that holds us together, and what is the sharp knife that cuts us and create our divisions.
I was born at a time when, I believe, my mother and father were two people who were not only hopelessly drawn to each other, but my father was so much in love with my mother that he wrote her a note, part of which read: “My pen has now become the supreme ruler of my heart.”
My father is now 94, and I am 64, and I would not ever want to google it to determine if my father stole a line from some lovestruck poet, or his words were his alone — either driven by passion or maybe emotion and a rush that was impelling him to write stupid words to the woman who was my mother.
Years later, I found myself — foolish like my father was — writing words to the woman who would later be my first wife: “When I walk away from you and I sense that you do not miss me, I want you to miss me; even say it, even if you do not mean it.” Talk about a sucker for punishment!
Men are absolute idiots when they bring themselves into the reality that they are infinitely lesser beings in the presence of the women they love. But most men want to be damn fools just for that! They want to be considered as heroes to their women when, in truth, no man who is in love with a woman can afford the luxury of being a hero to many over being a slave to the one woman he desires.
I have considered love, lived it, and in many ways it has consumed me. Love has destroyed a part of me and its rediscovery has taken me back to the days when there was no darkness and there was only her face smiling at me and her lips telling me to live my life but ensure that there was a space for her presence in my times of joy and happiness.
My 94-year-old father is a better man than I could ever be. He has lived his loyalty and love and, when I was a child, I saw at quite a young age that, where he wanted to rein in my brothers and sisters in disciplinary moments, he was probably doing that to create romantic space for him and Mama.
He is a better man than I am because I could never stick around to raise eight children, have a wife who would love me implicitly and naughtily, send them all off to good schools, and still get to call himself husband.
But I believe I am beginning to understand what colours love and what gave my father his role as lover, poet and daddy — nothing more than my mother; the lady who brought him to tears when she slept away nearly 10 years ago.
I have always been consumed by love — even in the years when love took its brutal step and told me its goodbye. In the 1980s, when Ann, my first wife, saw goodness turned to bad and decided that she had had enough and took the boys and left, I felt what love felt like when it took the long trip into nothingness.
When by some stroke of luck she returned to me and made me so crazily happy, I made myself the promise only to be in love, to be even a good remnant of the terrible man that I was and to revel in what love brought back to me.
Life, like love, creates its own directions. You are here today, in love and tomorrow, you are alone and on the verge of despair.
Want to take a tip from me? There is hope. Should you give up on yourself, you have given up on hope. Hope may very well be that cloud holding rain, but it never lasts forever. The sun will come back out.
OK, that sounds quite corny, but I am feeling so much in love today. And what makes it so much better is that I do not even care if Chupski feels the same for me — hope she doesn’t read this!
I can remember, in 1971, writing a letter to Ann and saying in it: “So, if I love you, what business it is of yours?”
In that time, as now, I was a slave to the belief that love must be without limitations. And without conditions. Last week I wrote a note to Chupski: “Stop being beautiful. I need to see another side of you.” She laughed.
It is not love if rainbows in dark skies do not show their colours, or sunsets do not bring tears of regret or laughter in the face of a lover saying, ‘I love you’. What is love but someone trying to utter the words which may pierce your heart or, maybe, mend your soul?
What is love if it is not that piece of life taken from you and given to her, not necessarily as a loan but certainly, with no interest attached?
What are you without love? Strong and able to sustain the daily hum of life and the cha-ching of the supermarket, and an eye looking out for someone.
Want another hint? Don’t look for anyone.
There are times when it is better to have love in your heart than in your life. Please remember, though, if you are with someone you love, never tell them that. As wisdom comes into your life you will recognise one certain thing. There will be those who are loved, those who love, and most of the people in the world would love to have been loved. My father had a motorbike, and in the 1950s he took us to the cinema. On the way back, at Beechwood Avenue, the police stopped him. My father had six of us, including my mother, on that bike. Was he breaking the law? Of course he was. Was he in love, with his family, and crazily so? Of course he was!
As I move around this country there is much that disgusts me, but, hopeless romantic that I am, there is much that I am in love with, almost as much as I love Chupski.
Sometimes I want to go back to the country, to the mountains, to the cool air of Moneague, and to experience all over again the joys of childhood. Is it impending death which has brought on these feelings?
Absolutely not! It is the joy of life and the hope that you too will experience that joy, even though this country is a very tough place to live. It does help if someone is beside you clipping your nails in the day and nagging you beautifully at night.
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