to the older couple at the table behind me to my left
to the older couple at the table behind me to my left
on PDA, judging, and learning
We sit outside Ithaca's renowned Moosewood Restaurant enjoying the first shared dishes of our lunch - a cheese plate, some olives and some whole wheat sourdough with olive oil - when an older couple appears ahead of me walking to be seated. They're holding hands as they approach.
The gentleman appears to be in his early sixties: bald, slim, and educated in the way he carries himself the way an older man does when he’s decidedly sure of himself and his place in the world. His paramour to his right has the greying hair of a woman around the same age, in a dress that is slightly more revealing than one would expect, but this being a college town in upstate New York, it doesn't roll eyes.
They are seated at a table for four, but they do not sit across from each other. She sits with her back to the street, a tree in between them and the cars heading down the one-way four-lane thoroughfare, he sits directly to her right, their eye contact making the hypotenuse of love’s triangle. They are huddled close as if for warmth despite this being a summer's day, though cooler and drier than recent afternoons, especially under the shade of the tree. They still produce a warmth between them over what is probably decades of love, but could perhaps be a second or third time around. I'll never know as I don’t ask.
My daughter notices the couple as well. She sees how they're sitting, how close they are to each other. Her face propels a side-eye my way, with a smirk in its side-car. Her glance implies that she too thinks they should get a room, having learned about certain things in 7th grade health class this past year. She’ll be thirteen in two days despite herself.
I await the check as she and my wife head to do a bit of shopping before we head back on the road. I notice the man get up, walk between two tables into an eave of sorts formed by the tree behind his lady friend. He crouches down and for the life of me I cannot understand what he's doing. But this particular moment of ignorance is short-lived as his lady friend describes the scene happening behind me to the couple to her left: the table is uneven, he's gone to make a shim out of a few piece of mulch, and then shares an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David doesn't want to use a cloth napkin to do the same. It's not the story I find annoying or her Guy Friday creating a shim on this Saturday afternoon but her voice and with it the immediacy of my thoughts turning to questions of how anyone could put up with that voice during a first date let alone a life time of partnership. I think it must be love's blindness - or in this case deafness - that allows it to happen.
I look around the other tables in this al fresco scene and wonder whether others are having this same thoughts that I am. That couple to her left, whom she engaged in what felt like a nervous explanation, have the wardrobed appearance of money and means. They must be a bit put out, having hoped to enjoy a peaceful vegetable-forward meal. I look and listen to the conversation happening behind me to the right, between a couple and its third wheel who states she's a local who loves this restaurant, knows the owners, before talking about different blood tests that confuse me. I can't imagine they've seen the scene unfolding 15 feet from their table that was previously missing that third wheel's salad despite the couple’s food arriving 20 minutes ago.
I glance directly to my right at a table with what appears to be a mother and father accompanied by a daughter I assume matriculates a local college, snippets of internships and European travels woven between bites, though not of the mother's Niçoise salad as it appears mostly uneaten. I tell myself that there is something on her mind, though it's likely not the shim being placed by the man in love at the table behind me. I look at our waitress, who doesn't appear to have made a career out of it having taken far too long to come take our order initially, taking far too long to get my receipt, and seeming far too distracted to notice when a new party is seated by the hostess, let alone to notice the man grabbing a wood chip from the garden.
Why does any of this matter? It doesn’t. The couple is not hurting anyone with their public display of affection. But I’m hurting myself sitting in my silent, unnoticed judgment of them. While The Beatles are wrong that all you need is love (see: water, air, food, sleep, to name but four), they're actually more right than my current - and typically default - state is. We should encourage more, not less, love. The world needs more love. The public needs to see more love in the simple acts of the holding of hands, of the opening of doors, of the pulling out of chairs, of the giving of an honestly bracing compliment.
Corinthians 13:4-8 says:
love is patient; love is blind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
I failed all of these during that lunch. I grew impatient with the waitress; I sneered at the couple even if only in my mind’s mouth. I was envious that they have the confidence to show their affection so blatantly, and judged them for it with my rolled eyes. I thought I was better than them; I grew irritated with the waitress and scoffed at the person wearing a Covid mask with my eyes;1 I made mental notes of the couple seated next to them placing them as elite and belittled them as a result; I laughed to myself at the woman next to me who was so excited to take her friends to the restaurant only to have her lunch delayed when her server forgot to deliver it but rejoiced not in the truth but in the stories I told myself about my fellow patrons.
Yes I failed, but I'm not irredeemable. I recall the love is... cartoons from the comics section of the newspaper from my childhood. It's the one with the outlines of a naked non-genitaled couple with various things that love is. Love is doing nothing with your something special; caring for one another more each day; telling her she’s beautiful without her makeup on; enjoying the simple things in life, together. The memory made me compile my own list.
Love is cleaning the dishes; love is emptying the sink drain without being asked. Love is brushing your wife's hair while watching her favorite television show; love is saying thank you and meaning it. Love is bringing coffee to her bedside. Love is getting a centimeter-thick piece of wood to even out the table so you can enjoy a lunch in the sun with the woman you love, oblivious to the public around you but fully displaying the affection you feel.
My wife has recently taken to gardening and landscaping. She spent the spring and summer pruning the bushes, cleaning up the beds, planting new trees, flowers and bushes, ripping out the dead grass and reseeding the bare spots - first with grass seed, and again, and again with grass seed, and then with clover, which took - and relocating her planted plants to other spaces, sometimes multiple times. Our yard has never looked better and my wife has never looked happier.
So now every time I see a wood chip, I have two reasons to remember what love is.
This was before the current wave. In retrospect, they could have been protecting us from their known germs.