In the early 90′s, my family and I moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where we lived for 16 years.

During that period I divorced and I took on full-time work, which for a tutor means after school, evenings and weekends.

My Sundays were packed. I scheduled students every hour beginning at 10AM and finishing up at 8PM, and I had an extremely efficient system:  I’d set up shop at a table in the cafe of the local Barnes and Noble, and as one student finished tutoring the next would sit down.

The B&N management liked this arrangement because parents would then hang out and shop and buy Starbucks goodies while they waited for their kids. And they also tolerated Jake, who seemed to live at the bookstore, eternally camped in the corner, working on one of the charcoal portraits he did to produce his extremely minimal living.

I’m calling him Jake because in my memory he resembles a pale, underweight Jake Gyllenhaal. Delicately handsome, fragile, gentle yet intense, like a consumptive Victorian poet plunked down in the middle of this suburban mall.

He was very smart, sensitive and perceptive, somewhere in his early thirties, and single and rootless and entirely uninterested in material things or conventional life. Sometimes I’d see him stop sketching; he’d go fetch a book off a shelf and read for an hour or so, then go put the book back.

Jake would sip free cups of water all day long, and he’d graciously accept the occasional lattes and paninis I’d buy for him. If one of my students canceled, Jake would come and sit at my table.

Jake was involved with a conventionally “successful” woman, whom he saw only rarely, when she needed him. Mostly he was alone. I was involved in a similar sort of thing at the time.

Birmingham is a hilly place and the mall sits on a rise overlooking the Red Mountain Pass. Alabama’s air pollution makes for extraordinarily lovely sunsets, which I considered a Sunday treat. One evening Jake and I sat at my table and gazed out the plate-glass bookstore window onto astonishing reds and blues, and he mused:

It seems to me that I love you really, usually, means:

I love the way you make me feel about myself.

This struck me as completely cynical, and also entirely true.

Jake’s words have been stuck in my head for years now; I keep taking them out and looking at them. I’ve mostly wanted to deny them, especially insofar as, yes, they feel true about me. How weak and needy, how selfish and sad!

It’s only recently that I see that:

• Yes, Jake was right, and
• No, there’s nothing sad or pitiful about it

What is love for?…I’m going to begin unpacking my answer, so please tune back in!

(photo of NY Public Library)

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    Last reviewed: 2 Feb 2011