"He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."  ---Gabriel Garci-a Marquez, Love In The Time of Cholera


As with Love In the Time of Cholera love can make itself most known when circumstances are dire, when there's no end of the misery in sight, when all seems lost.

I was deeply disturbed and heartbroken when she said she was leaving...and taking Jacob with her, of course, the six year old boy I'd not fathered but had come closest to being a son.
Like a ship storm-tossed at sea, its rudder torn from its hull, I had no sense of where the next land would be sighted and when. This was my family, "was" the new and stunningly abrupt operative verb.
I had no clue this cataclysm of the heart was a necessary breaking open to a new possibility, indeed a new love that would endure, lifting me up and forward in the decades to come. No idea in that piercingly painful moment.

In fact, it would be only a few short months until a meeting with Karin on my own home turf now being suddenly evacuated by those I thought I had a higher commitment to.

In those months unexpected concern and compassion came from my father in the form of a gentle ear instead of hollow didactic guidance, "words of wisdom" with a subtext of measurement, expectation or future ideals. I was deeply appreciative and as an adult son mature enough to receive that support and love in exactly the spirit in which it was given.

When I finally did meet my new friend Karin, I had no urgency or frozen need to be taken care of. I was well along in my healing journey and I have, among others, a father to thank.

He turns 90 this year and carries my mother from room to room.