Love in the Moment

Love can hit you in vulnerable moments.

You’re walking distractedly down a street when you trip and fall. Shaken, you try to catch your breath before making the effort to stand. A woman pauses and asks if you’re okay. There’s a hint of amusement in her attitude. You realize you will recover quickly. Maybe you’ll even stop walking around with your head in the clouds. You get to your feet and smile. She nods and continues on her journey, but in that moment you’ve fallen in love.

You get yelled at by your boss. When he storms out of your office, your officemate says, “He’s so unfair. You did the right thing.” Soon, you’ll be collegial officemates again, but in the moment, a halo surrounds her.

The “you” in these little scenarios is an imagined me, and both these imaginary saviors are women. But while these moments reveal reflexive male responses, they aren’t erotic.

The word “love” in a post I wrote a few years ago may have cost me a sixty-year friendship. My friend hadn’t protested earlier posts I’d written around his experiences. This time, however, he was angry. Lately, I speculate that a reference to “love” lay at the root of his grievance.

In the post, I depict my friend on a group trip to a distant shore. The group sets off one morning for a swim in the sea. My friend has two significant disabilities, but he’s almost completely independent. Nevertheless, he can’t keep up. Rather than struggle further, he sits on a rock and revels in the movement of the waves against his legs. Catching sight of him, a woman comes back and offers assistance. He is content and declines. She gives him a hug.

In the version my friend saw, I added a phrase to the effect that he fell in love. I meant, but didn’t explicitly write, love in the moment. Sadly, I suspect he read the line as a declaration that he’d had no intention of making to the woman. Even at the time, I understood why he wouldn’t want the real woman to think otherwise. I removed the phrase.

It happened that as my friend was emailing his aggrieved response to my post, I was stuck at my hairdresser’s waiting for my wife to come and walk home with me. Sitting in the chair during those ten minutes, as I’d more romantically pictured my friend perched on that rock in the sea, I looked back on how the left femur fracture I sustained had aggravated my arthritic condition and cost me much of my hard-won independence. I’d traveled alone with my white cane around numerous cities on two continents. Now I walk safely on my own only in the building where my wife and I live. Yet there I was, contented among people who couldn’t have been more considerate.

Nature can be harsh. The birds I love to hear chirping outside my window eagerly gobble up weaker creatures. Nature gives life and energy to us humans, but it can deny us such gifts as sight, hearing and mobility, never mind mental stability and a reliable heart. It is friends and family who can make up for nature’s harsher ways. So, too, can the people we encounter in passing. They might move on, but their kindness endures in memory.

Recently, I was walking down our street with my long-time physical therapist at my side. Once again, I’ve had to shake off self-consciousness, knowing how I must look arcing my white cane in one hand and relying on a support cane with the other, my back hunched thanks to spinal stenosis. It’s a far cry from the image I projected as recently as five years ago. A middle-aged woman wished us a pleasant “good morning” as she walked by. We wished her the same. I said to my therapist, a marathon runner, “It’s great when people are nice to an odd couple like us!” Thankfully, she laughed. In that moment, I fell in love twice.