I don't think real love dies. People come and go, but if you love someone, do they really ever leave?

I know a man whose wife did leave him, and she tried to completely cut all ties, all possible contact so that she could put him into a tightly locked box in a remote part of her past. Yet, for him, it was never really over in the sense that his affection remained. Sure, he accepted the end of their relationship, his concept of her changed, and he opened up to other people. However, she was always alive for him, so that a song might touch off her memory. He loved her all the while she was treating him badly. The strange part was that the difficulty of that painful struggle only made the love stronger.

It was a realistic love in that he held no illusions that they would get back together, but he knew that he had loved her like no other, and that he loved her still. He supposed he would love her always, and sometimes it touched off a reverie: did he love the woman who existed somewhere in the world today, or did he love the woman who was, who existed at one time in the world ? the woman he knew and remembered but who had changed so much and left so long ago that perhaps it was more true to say that the woman he loved still had died on some yesterday? It was a complex reality he attempted to navigate; all he knew was that his love for her lived on.

I was sitting in my place on Sunday. I had a CD of Keith Urban going, and there was something in his work that opened me up. We carry so much in our hearts. It comes out in music, songs, and stories about living. Our lives are full of tragedies, dramas, conflicts, struggles, victories, and celebrations. They never stop. If it weren't enough to live them, we retell them and act them out for one another in books and movies. We sing them to one another in songs, and we perform them in plays. Sometimes we don't even need to put words to an experience, because the music itself takes us away.

I wonder if we have a limited capacity to love intimately. Once you've used up your quota, your capacity, have you gone through the romance "change of life?" After that last one, is there anything left?

One of my best friends lost her husband to lung cancer a few years back. They'd been married to one another for most of their lives, and they'd been through struggles of various kinds. When he was gone, though, she knew there would be no other. She carried the marriage inside her, and it lived on. There was one man for her, and that's all there was.

Someone told me recently that she is a serial monogamist. Me too. Now, I know, I'm a man, and I'm supposed to be ? well, just plain serial, I guess. Another one of my friends is a devout evolutionist. He claims that while women are driven to hold out for the best, in terms of the gene pool, men are driven to strive for the most. Yikes! That would sear my soul. I get too involved with people for that. I go for one, and I go all out for that one. Not only that, I hang in there to make it work with that one, so that it takes me years to get ready for what comes next.

Well, Keith Urban has finished. Guess I'll put on some Allison Krause. By the way, have you ever listened to Union Station's Jerry Douglas play the Dobro? He's in a class by himself ? like Jimi Hendrix (what d'ya mean you've never heard of these people?!)?

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