I Hove You

I love pizza. I love a good movie. I used to love swimming, but only in pools, not the ocean, especially after the movie Jaws, which really scared me, though in retrospect I loved the original version. But they were comical by the time they got to the IV and V sequels. I can say the same for Rocky and Rambo. I loved both the originals. I thought I loved the movie Chariots of Fire. While I was watching it in the theater I was mesmerized and resolved to turn my life around. I promised myself that I would take up jogging to the strains of that movie music in my headphones, that I would jog home from the theater. But as I walked up the aisle further from the screen the resolve faded with my opinion of the film. And by the time I got through the lobby and out into the daylight, I was shaking my head at how lame all that slow motion running really was.

I love vacations in big rental houses in exotic places with old friends cooking and drinking and laughing, though I definitely don’t love getting there. I used to love flying, but I don’t love it anymore. Maybe that’s because of 9/11, or maybe it’s because the airlines have squeezed all the love out of the experience.

I love spring. April is my favorite month. No matter poet T. S. Eliot called it the “cruelest month,” I love April because it is so filled with optimism that may never be realized in the chill of September. I love a cold beer on hot summer afternoons. “Would you care for another beer?” “I’d love one.” I love my kids of course, and I try to make it a practice of telling them “I love you” whenever we talk on the phone or video chat on the computer. Sometimes they say it first and I usually reply “Love you too,’ which I mean as an affirmation of how I feel about them and not an indication of my taste in music. That also goes for other family members from grandchildren to cousins, as well as close friends. I can even say it to some of the people I barely know. “I really love you, man” or “Dude, I love you.” It’s because that kind of “I love you” is very non-threatening, almost automatic, like saying “God bless you” when anyone, even an atheist, sneezes. But saying the words “I love you” to a person I might in reality actually love and/or make love to, someone who has seen me in unflattering positions in intimate detail in compromising states and not always at my best, is quite another matter.

It must be a guy thing, or maybe just my thing. I blame it on two divorces and a string of romantic entanglements that ended badly, but I think that just might be an excuse.

I can always manage the other “L” word, “Like,” with very little effort. It trips easily off the tongue without all that “Luh-luh-luh–” stuttering. “I like you. I like you a lot. I mean, I really like you a very lot. A lot more than those other people that I like a lot.”

I did get close to saying the words several times, once in particular, after my second divorce when I began seeing a younger woman where I worked. In the four years that we were “a couple,” she sent me no occasion greeting cards to tell me how much fun I was to be with. She always signed them “Love.” When I reciprocated I signed mine the same, but the “L,” because of my poor penmanship, looked more like an “h,” as in “I hove you.” It became our little private joke, and my little handwriting gaff made it easier for me to express my feelings for her. And that’s the way we went on, loving and hoving, until she fell out of hove and loved someone else.

It’s a lot of water under the bridge, and I am not looking back with regret. I just wanted you to know that I hove you very much. I hove you as much as I have ever hoved anybody. I hove you. There, I said it, even if I can’t find the right word to tell you.

© 2012 Joseph E. Scalia