Groovy kind of love….By Nayana Gadkari

A friend of mine penned a beautiful obituary for his late mother. He described his deep bond with his "ma," but what has stayed with me since was a heartfelt account of the love story between his late parents.

Love Story…just these words invoke great emotion in us all. For me, there was no greater or more impossible love than the one between Catherine and Heathcliff – the protagonists of the novel by Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights -one of the great works of literature. It also marked how I went through life, imagining what love was like. It seemed like it should be all-consuming, sometimes selfish, felt and given with wild and occasionally erotic abandon, curls flying, eyes flashing in love and anger in equal parts. Love was, in every possible way, this massive mound of explosive dynamite which, once lit, was supposed to consume, obliterate, and elevate or destroy or perhaps both.

But what is love actually supposed to be? Why do we idolize love that comes with unfulfilled longing, what about my friends' parents' love story? The one that endured the test of time, the one that was resilient, the one that was steadfast. As I sit at my kitchen table on this bitterly cold December morning, the branches of spruce trees just outside the glass doors are laden with heavy snow. It is pretty, but the pretty isn't penetrating my heart; the steam of my strong Ethiopian black coffee does little to warm me up or douse the confusion I feel inside. My thoughts drift back to them.

I imagine their relationship, at first created by marriage between families but crafted into a beautiful bond by two very different individuals. What did it take for their love to blossom? As I thought of them, I wondered, what if love isn't in the extraordinary? What if it is truest when it is ordinary? What if love was in the ginger chai made just the way he liked it? What if it was in a joke shared that no one else was privy to? What if it was in the shared love of the song "Black Velvet," in her love of his little boy smile? What if love showed itself in their photos, with her looking at her man with utmost adulation? What if it showed itself in the same picture with his hand protectively around her shoulder?

What if it was in the storms weathered, in jealousy assuaged, in individualities protected while fiercely guarding the relationship they both nurtured? A dear friend once remarked that we could achieve much in life, but could it mean anything without that special witness to our lives? What if love meant, "Your life will not go unwitnessed, and that I will be its witness?" Their good, evil, ugliest, and most beautiful; perhaps it all needed each other's testimony; maybe he needed her as a witness just like she did him. And then it dawned on me about this wondrous pathos called love that made Edward the 8th give up his crown to be with the woman he loved.

Perhaps love understands that it complicates, it drowns. It knows it takes your mind to dark places where few dare venture. It knows it can twist a perfectly sunny day into a frigid inferno. And it knows there are no ordinary days in love; you rise or you fall. And that perhaps love lies in the mundane as much as it lies in ecstasy. Perhaps love simply meant showing up again and again on days when you didn't think you could remain in love.

Oh, but what do I know? Perhaps when I am in the dusking hours of my life's journey, in the waning light of my existence, I hope that my Wuthering Heights and Jane Austen-fired heart holds his hand and tells him, "We had a groovy kind of love."