ONE LINE OPENS MY EYES

ONE LINE OPENS MY EYES

We've all, at one time or another, heard something said that touched us in the deepest way. Something that opened the portals of our heart's and released a flurry of possibilities...including the idea that love could be real in our own lives if we open ourselves up to it.

I shall tell you the true story of a man who had experienced the worst this world could mete out, a man who's heart turned to stone...as a matter of survival...not knowing that shutting out the pain also shuts out the pleasure. His journey led him round the world only to find the most romantic thing he'd ever heard in the last place one would ever look...that man was me.

I left home early on, in search of what do not know. My mind was so wrapped up in this search that I lost contact with everyone from friend to sibling to parent. Every few years I would unexpectedly pop up at my parents’ house...I needed to see what time had done to the people from my used to be life.

On a lazy beautiful delta day I walked up to the back porch door of my familial home...the house was built in a shotgun fashion...a door with window, a short entryway, a second door with window looking directly into the kitchen where I saw my mother, back to me, standing at the stove cooking took a moment to really look at what seventy three years had done to this young Italian beauty...time was not kind to my mother. She was short and heavy with wide hips, and her breasts had been conquered by gravity. Her face seemed to have withered somehow into a mask of resignation.

As I started opening the second door I saw my father, seventy five and physically a shadow of the man he once was, walk in from the living room and ease up behind her. I froze, door half open, in fascination of what my mind told me was about to happen. He slid his hands from her hips up her ample waist to her breasts’ I barely heard his whisper

"Amelia...lets-a go in the bedroom and fool around"

She turned to face him [neither had noticed me in that hallway] and lifted her tired face to his

"I'm too old and don't like sex anymore. I’ve had eight children and I slave everyday...go find a beautiful young prostitute...I'll even pay for her"

And now dear reader shall quote to you the most romantic thing I've ever heard spoken. Very calmly, my father looked into her eyes, a softness I'd never seen in his face, and said

"No...Your my wife...your beautiful to me...I want you"

Some long ago connection must have come back to life in her. She held his face in her hands and kissed him on his lips for a long moment, then she turned off the stove, took his hand and said, in her thick Italian accent

"Come on-a you ,I'm-a goanna take-a good care of you"

I watched them move slowly, hand in hand, through the living room door heading for their bedroom to take delight in each other once again. Of course I did have the decency to turn around and leave till the next day.

The next evening, my father and I were sitting in his study, he with his wife and I with my beer asked him how he had kept his love alive for fifty two years. His answer opened the doors of my heart and brought a moisture to my eyes that verged on tears

"Son...when I look at her...She's still eighteen to me".

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