Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
I’ve come to think of this post as one where you come for the music and stay for the conversation—so feel free to drop a note. The diarist gets to sleep in if she so desires and can show up long after the post is published. So you know, it's a feature, not a bug.
Join us, please.
Those Moments of Glad Grace
It is Valentine’s Day and I would be a bit remiss if not to at least acknowledge it—though it isn’t high on my list of holidays. Just another one of those Roman holidays (this one Lupercalia) that was usurped by the church and named after some obscure bishop or priest who no doubt died a horrible death. I don’t mean to sound dismissive this morning because love I do love. What it is this particular morning is the reductio ad absurdum nature of such holidays: the fact that we are able to commercialize and trivialize even love to within an inch of its death. Love is no longer sacred and pure and torturous, or the casual exchange of a touch between ancient lovers, or even the freedom to be one’s self in the company of another.
I admit to being a bit old-fashioned in a few things and love probably falls into that category. I was never big on heart-shaped boxes of chocolates or long-stemmed red roses or even the obligatory candle-lit dinner in a restaurant above your pay grade. So while I may not be able easily to define love, I do know it can’t be that. On this particular day, I habitually read a few poems that stir in me remembrances of past broken hearts and lost loves—those of a more innocent time and nature. “When You Are Old” by William Butler Yeats is on that list.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
This is a poem of regret as much as it might be of love. We’re reminded that love is easy in times of glad grace and toward those of great beauty; but perhaps it is those that love us for our restless souls and emotional depths that love us best. For me, love is the conscious willingness to suffer for someone infused with the irrational hope of not having to. For others it’s not having to say you’re sorry. For Yeats (in my cynical mind) love is a necessary salve to guard against regret. Perhaps. Or perhaps not. My first mature failure at love (when I was old enough to know the difference between lust and a desire to please as an end in itself) was embodied in a young woman named Robin.
We met at a conference in Baton Rouge that I attended in the eleventh grade. She was from a school much further north (near Monroe) and I was from the coast. But an odd chemistry or shared stress or for the perverse pleasure of the gods, placed us in the same small group and we shared a time together. I was the quiet shy type, she the comely extrovert. Still, we spent long hours talking and getting to know each other—enough that we continued to correspond for a long while after that conference ended. I even made it back to LSU that year (I had siblings who were attending) when she needed to be there for cheerleader camp. We spent an evening that stretched into the early morning near one of the lakes on campus. There was an ease there that I felt for the very first time in my life~like I could speak my truth, whisper my secrets and not be judged. While it’s not the whole of it, I do know that such a feeling is part of love and what I missed most about Robin when we drifted apart as 15-year-olds will do that live over 300 miles apart.
Robin taught me more than how to kiss better, though. She taught me that love has an intellectual dimension, that physical engagement isn’t enough for me—my mind must be challenged and dared or those days of glad grace are but moments of fleeting beauty that fill a tiny void on chilly mornings while I ponder the verse of long-dead poets.
Good morning everyone and welcome. No matter your take on the meaning of love,
I hope you have a wonderful Friday and an even better weekend.
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Friday’s Lagniappe
This week’s highlight from The Bitter Southerner is “Angola’s Angst: A Disquieting Tour Through the Largest Maximum Security Prison in the Nation” by Beth Shelburne.
“The flowers around the entrance are deceptive, like a bunch of bright party balloons tied to the gates of an asylum….The driver parks the van and our group stirs. I am among nine people who have arrived to take a tour of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola Prison. I write about prisons regularly as a journalist based in Birmingham, Alabama, but this is my first time visiting a prison outside Alabama. Anyone can tour Angola for free with a reservation booked through the prison museum. This makes it an outlier among America’s prisons, which rarely open their gates for tours and include layers of bureaucratic rules and headaches for family members to visit incarcerated loved ones.”
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?