Loving Something Well
When I was young and about to ask the girl I loved to marry me, I went for a walk with a man I then knew to ask for counsel. This was a man with some miles under him, who had achieved a way of considering substantial matters with a humble and curious heart. I asked him to tell me about being married, to tell me how to make sure that the knot of my intention would stay snug as his had done for over forty years. He answered me thus:
“I remember a similar question that a girl once asked me, a girl that I too loved and hoped to marry.” He stopped, considered the memory through dappled sunlight, and a breath shuddered the leaves in the treetops. “She wanted me to promise that I’d love her as much forever as I did at that very moment, when our love was new, and a lifetime seemed enormous, without a whole lot of definition. I remember how mad she got when I said I couldn’t make that promise, that it wouldn’t be fair to either of us.”
He smiled.
“I wasn’t trying to be cute, and I wasn’t trying to seem unduly wise about the ways of the heart, though I suppose like most young people I thought I knew more than I did. My answer was honest, and in hindsight I think it was the only fair answer I could offer to someone I cared for as much, someone with whom I hoped to spend a lifetime.”
He gathered his thoughts for a moment and tried to locate the robin that had begun singing in a nearby maple.
“I knew I was in love with her, and I knew I hoped to continue feeling that love for her for as long as fate would allow, and I knew that she, like me, was a little bit scared that such a significant feeling might change. I also knew that I had no idea how exactly I would feel in a year, or ten, or fifty. But what I believed with clarity, and a little bit of requisite uncertainty, was that I wanted to see just what we might come to feel for each other over a journey we could rightfully barely imagine. I wanted to see what the love of a couple kids could grow into in all the days and miles ahead.”
We began walking some more, and he thought a little bit, stooped forward, his hands clasped behind his back.
“I’m pretty sure that beneath the unknowns she felt the same way.” He chuckled softly.
“But you know, at the time, she didn’t really like the answer. She reminds of that every now and again, all these years later. And I remind her that I’m every day a little more in love with the process of seeing what our marriage will become.”
For all its innate poetry I liked this story, just as I liked the man who shared it. But the lesson it contained, and the practice it implied, was difficult for me to embrace. In the days that followed I asked my sweetheart to marry me, and I may too have asked her to promise that her feelings for me would never change. We have now marked twenty years together, with two beautiful daughters and a handsome life to show for it. But it hasn’t always been easy… I don’t mean the marriage part, or the relationship part, or the inevitable lumps and bumps we’ve taken, and occasionally dealt upon each other. What has been hard is coming to believe that our relationship can, must, grow and change, must be given the freedom to follow circuitous routes into places unpredictable and untracked. I like certainty, and I don’t much like change. It’s scary.
I think a lot these days about the things I love, and how I sometimes fear that my love for them will become something foreign to me. When I’m honest with myself I can see that I approach change, particularly change over time, as something implicitly negative, a degradation or a lessening of a feeling that once was precious to me. I naively equate change to loss. I think about dogs getting old and losing their sight, limping down that path toward frailty and heartbreak. I think about the hardwoods maturing in my beloved grouse coverts and abandoned orchards, pushing probable places into ones soon static and silent, void of whirring flushes. I think about posted signs and fence lines and landowners from away, all of which seem bent on keeping me out of landscapes where I once felt welcome. And I think about how, increasingly, I ask myself what it might feel like if I lose track of why and how I love chasing birds through wild places, what I’ll do if the singing that such things elicit in my heart comes to ring different, or one day fails to pull me forward… perhaps up out of the ditch of despair.
It’s stupid, I know. But fear is irrational.
Inadvertently, all these years later, I approached these thoughts with another man who’d accumulated his own miles, and I asked him too for counsel. This was a man who has loved birds and dogs and wild places, loved identifying as a hunter, one whose self has been shaped by days on the Montana prairies. He has tumbled more birds with consideration than I might in three lifetimes, seen more birds rising skyward than I will ever hope to see. I didn’t ask him outright about his take on maturing, or change, or whether he, like me, ever felt afraid that the thing by which he’d always made meaning might lessen in his heart. But I thought the question in my mind as I walked beside him, matching his enduring steps, wondering if his love for things that I love too ever threatened to become less, or whether he had ever worried that it might. In the end I didn’t have to ask, just listen; maybe he sensed the question tugging.
We were walking the coulees outside Livingston Montana, following a young, green pointer and one with a bit more polish. He didn’t have a gun with him, and he seemed a little bit sad that I in fact did.
“You know,” he said, stooping forward and clasping his hands behind his back in a gesture emblematic of thoughtful, aging men. “I’ve become so much part of these birds, or they’ve become so much part of me, that I just love to go out and see that they are here. Sometimes I still like to carry a fine gun, but I don’t even put shells in it anymore. I haven’t shot a bird in years. I don’t want to. I don’t think my dogs care anymore either. I think that together we’ve moved beyond that point and landed at someplace different.”
We walked on, and he was quiet, and I chewed on his sentiments and a stem of prairie grass, and the hard-shelled grasshoppers buzzed away from our footfalls. The pointers made big casts through the space around us. I thought about the way he said it, his quiet words filled with contentment and resolve, tinged with something close to pride. In them there was no sadness, or fear of something lost. There was, instead, a sense of something realized, a love that had mellowed and matured for a lifetime, given the space to grow into something new. His was a love that didn’t require promises or strictures but was instead afforded the chance to sculpt itself like art, unquantified by shots fired or birds brought to bag. It was allowed to be bigger than that.
We’d made the swing back to the truck and into the wind, and the older pointer seemed bent on the water bowl, while the younger one, brimming with youth, look one last big swing around a knob. A few hundred yards off she made a hard turn, tripped into a point. In a moment, a small covey of Sharptails rose from the dry ground, worked up speed over their clucking rise, and then set wings to soar over the place where earth met sky.
I could feel the heartbeat of my intention, the weight in my boots shift forward in an unthinking assumption of pursuit. My companion never made a move that way. He’d reached the truck and filled the water bowl, and he simply watched the faraway pointer come unstuck, making a halfhearted chase and then quitting it. He smiled.
“You know,” he said, maybe more to himself than to me, “I think what I really like is to see them fly away.”
Love is a many-splendored thing, finer than any rules we place upon it, better than our fear that it could end. As such, I’ve come to consider my heart as something that can, and should, continue to open up, to be more filled, in whatever way it will. Need I worry that the things I love will leave me? Probably not. There’s more joy to be found in the faith that those things will grow, and change, and become more resonant as they soar towards an unfathomable future. And if they soar away, not too be even seen again, well, that will be ok too. It will not mean my love was not real. It will simply mean that it too will soar with them, landing in places that lie just beyond sight, on ground I’ve not yet seen, and cannot even yet imagine.
First Published in Gundog Magazine
