these are the words that begin Milton's most heart-wrenching description of love. "where she is, there also is paradise" it sounds all beautiful and hopeful until you find that the voice is choosing hell over eternity without "her" and then it becomes beautiful and VERY disturbing. we find ourselves in all kinds of pickles over love. there are killings over love or due to unrequited love. there are fortunes made and lost in the pursuit of love. frequently it is expressed that we have lost the meaning of love. that lust and fluid exchange are the only thing we as a culture call love.

i'm not terrible pro-modern-american-culture. i see the problems and generally i find myself a cynic towards them. when it comes to love though i am a helpless romantic. i believe in it. i do not think we have lost it. and i do everything i can to teach it to my daughter. so that when she grows up in an ever more cynical world she too can still have faith in love.

my wife is the thing that leads me ever onward. how quaint, i know. but with her i feel the depth of Milton's words. i follow where she leads, into hell or heaven. it matters not, as long as she is in my arms and i in hers. were she to leave me i would find myself more lost than i think i have ever been. that's saying alot when i for several years wandered the world in the guise of thelostboy.

i don't know that i could write about what makes that love or where it came from. there are so many dimensions. one of the more charming is her imaginary selves. i don't think i really knew of this part of her when we were dating. i might have had a faint introduction to one small aspect of it, but that is not the same thing. my wife has rich, deep, vivid color imaginings about the lives she is not living. in one i think she is a rock star, another a singleton doctor, one of the more charming is that of living a life in ball gowns. i don't know how to describe this to anyone short of calling up images of annie potts in Pretty in Pink, as she dances around the living room in house shoes, a prom dress and a bee-hive. she fantasizes that one day she will be financially able to wear nothing but ball gowns all the time. grocery shopping, house cleaning, playing with our daughter. all in couture. i love this image of my wife. the playfulness it suggests and the blush that plays on her cheeks when she talks of it.

it endears her to me in a way very little else does.

weekdays i ride the train to work. i get off at 4th and Yamhill and then walk across forth to Morrison. on the corner of forth and Morrison there is a bridal and formal shop. they display lovely and (frequently) tragic dresses in their window, come rain or shine. and i look longingly at the gowns imagining which ones leslie would pick to wear to sunday breakfast and saturday market. what dress would she feel comfortable in to take our little girl to the bus stop. it amuses me to no end. as i gaze and day dream i always wonder, if someday i will not just be window shopping, but walking in to buy her a new gown for watering the plants.

i think the day i make the deal that makes my career, instead of going out drinking to celebrate, i will go directly to a dress shop and buy my wife the most impractical-for-daily-life gown i can find. because to see her happy makes me happy.