“In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,” so wrote Alfred Lord Tennyson. Old men too, no lightly turns about it. And women of any age. The rites of spring have sent out their cues – some secret, some sensory, all potent and irresistible – and we hit our marks upon the stage to perform with hormones and instincts. Nature does it with “fecundity.” Disney called it “twitterpated” in the movie Bambi. Maybe you have an indelible love with whom to celebrate the renewal. Maybe you are searching. Maybe it’s all a montage of things past that stir suddenly in your blood like a faint call at twilight or something you were supposed to do or a place you were supposed to be that you can’t quite remember. And if you’re over 30, you probably smile a bit, because you know it’s madness.

Am I over 30? ‘Scuse me a minute while I check my birth certificate. Yup…112 years young. What about you?

Did it take you a while to finally get the “love” thing figured out? Took me forever. The evidence was there in my teens, though it was at least another decade before I fully understood that it was “no contest” between men and women. You do know that by and large women are much more realistic about love/lust than men are, don’t you? I mean, they network about relationships from the time they are six! They hit puberty with a PhD chemist’s understanding of cosmetics, while boys are still figuring out spit bubbles. Girls practice relationship dramas all through middle school on clueless boys who think they are being admired for how fast they can run (and they run slower and slower as testosterone kicks in). By late high school, a girl knows more about desire, heartbreak, euphoria, unrequited yearning, cattiness, pecking orders, hope, depression and role-playing than a committee of shrinks; while boys have learned not to drool in church and can kill a rat. When a young woman falls in love, she may be starry-eyed with anticipation, but she has a conclave of friends to pose all the right questions and help her calculate the pros and cons. Young men – great dumb beasts that they are – have learned not to discuss emotions or cry in front of anyone.

The way I see it, a guy thinks of sex as an end (puh) and is unlikely to contemplate it as the beginning to something complicated. A gal is more likely to think of passion as a beginning to something emotionally complex, no matter how satisfying the sex. It includes a calculation for her, even if romantic nuances sweep her off her feet along with blind bursts of hope that this may be a worthy object of all her instincts to attract. Thus, though a man is less likely than a woman to fall in love at all, when he does fall, he is more likely to be gobsmacked and blindsided. Calculation zero.

Anyway, that was me growing up, except arrested development hit me just after the spit-bubble stage, and I never killed rats. Also, I was idealistically romantic about everything: Cyrano de Bergerac, Don Quixote and Tom Sawyer rolled into one. I like to think that made me a hybrid between savvy and naïve, but I won’t quibble if you say it was just naïve. Grant me that it was a voluntary naïveté. Escaping reality is a nice place to visit, as long as you know that’s what you’re doing.

Exit stage left to Minnesota with half a lifetime of confirming that a true soulmate was not possible for me. Of course, if you declare something impossible, the gods of irony will make you own it. Put succinctly, never say never, even if never is forever. So, a hybrid I remain; but here in Minnesota beautiful women have this annoying habit of wanting to tear your clothes off for heaven only knows what purpose. It’s something in the water, I suppose, and there is a lot of water in Minnesota. But as long as they don’t want you to get serious about them…no harm, no foul. I just tell them I’m free though forever in love with a soulmate, and they stare at me for a while, blink, and then decide if half a loaf is better than none. Like I said, women are much more realistic about love/lust than men are. I don’t really get how – or why – they separate sex from love, but I get that they are capable of it. They don’t want men to think that they do, on account of they understand completely the male imperative. Men appraise sex by desire and connect it to love through exclusive access; women do the same but factor in the expectations of males. I just have to stay two steps ahead of that – oh, look at the time, gotta go shop for some new clothes!

Wardrobes aside, I still like the glow of old-school Disney romanticism. It’s a need I was bred to by genetics and by choice. But if a year has four seasons to flaunt its attire, life can have at least a couple of different outfits to wear. You don’t have to mix-and-match them at the same time so that they clash. Find your fashion and strut your stuff on the promenade. Just don’t sit naked in the dark while the hoi polloi do their thing all around you as if you’re invisible. The worst, most bogus morality in life is the morality that inflicts a double standard, so don’t be marginalized or made into wall-flora. Spring welcomes all flowers, whether perennially paired in formal gardens or in the wild.

Me, I’ll respect and imitate the uniform of the day, even if it doesn’t fit me. Yeah, I am severely out of fashion. They’ll never let me in the Easter Parade. But I’ll stand behind a mailbox and applaud those who keep in step as they march down the middle-of-the-road. What’s that old song? “…my bones denounce the buckboard bounce, and the wrong one I have choose/let’s go down to some big town where they love a gal by the color of her clothes, and I’m all yours in buttons and bows!” Man or woman, the important thing is not to sit out the festivities. To merge a couple of quotes, “this ain’t a dress rehearsal” and “life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.” Hanging in the closet means you missed the dance, and sitting on the bench makes you second string. There’s nothing romantic or ideal about being second string, and JV is a second-rate fate. But you don’t have to be a no-show on the field of play. Just check inside that mailbox I mentioned. Spring has sent you an RSVP.

April’s photos below as follows: #1-5 day or night winter adventures on skinny skis at Elm Creek and Crow-Hassan; #6 a view from an upstairs window; #7 my latest breakthrough innovation, wearing a humidifier furnace pad to heal a bone bruise from a ski accident. In lieu of several more photos, here’s a Facebook link to a very short video as winter wanes…  https://www.facebook.com/thomas.sullivan.395/videos/569960934049932 .  

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan