the love life of joel hoagland (page 62)

“There are three things that are too amazing for me, four that I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of a man with a maiden. –Proverbs 30:18,19

Once when I was a boy, I asked a girl to be my girlfriend. I wrote her a note which read, “It is with the utmost respect that I ask you to be my girlfriend.” The note was intercepted by her teacher, who read it, and was so impressed she waited until the end of the class and then let some other teachers read it. Eventually she handed it back to the girl for whom I’d written the note. Her name was Jennifer.

After that, nothing ever happened between us. I think we talked a time or two. But I remember distinctly, a time shortly after she’d received my note, when she crossed the lobby amid her bevy of friends. Her path was perpendicular to my rapt attention, but she looked sideways at me with a coy smile and then passed on. She was in the eighth grade. I was in the ninth.

I’m sure I left a very minor impression on Jennifer, but I’d like think, at least, that I was no hurt to her, for I cared for her. It was my awkwardness, as much as old-fashioned gentility, which conspired to keep me a paragon of circumspection and virtue in my youth. I hurt others later, and was also hurt. But I wouldn’t change the way my love life has played out, even if I could.

It costs much to love, and it seems, at certain moments, that we lose more than win. Do not regret, and do not despair, but hope in the fact of Love in this world. Each of us who loves another is infinitesimal but glittering, like a single grain of sand on a paradisaical shore, basking in the empyrean light of the Love of God. Who can understand why one person comes to fix his heart upon a beloved?