This afternoon I went to a birthday party for a gentleman turning 90 – he told me he reached this age in good health because he knew the magic formula. I asked him what that was, hoping he’d enlighten me.He looked at me and said, “Love. I fell in love with a good woman who loved me with her entire heart on my good days and bad days and I did the same for her.”I want a younger version of that man. Good days and bad days, oh yes, I have loved that way………. I am missing the man who can return that kind of love.
He said he isn’t too much to look at now days. What he doesn’t realize is, it is not how someone looks that is import, what sags and wrinkles only makes them that much more lovable. It all starts and ends with what’s inside. I choose to live with an open hand, open heart in hopes of finding real love someday……..and holding it.
I don’t want the guy with the 6-pack or the one who dresses to the nines, I don’t care about sports cars or how much money he makes, what he does for a living, I want the guy who’s hair has turned the color mother nature intended it to be at this age, the guy with the lines on his face………the lines life delivered……….I will climb over the pretty boys to get to the skin horse…….anyday of the week.
And now, one of my all time favorite passages from “The Velveteen Rabbit” – about the skn horse
“The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
I do have the capacity to love again…………in time……..in time. Right now, I have fresh wounds that need attention……..deep and raw, but in time I will be ready again.
That Velveteen Rabbit is such a wise book.