A Tiny Love Story
One of my favorite weekly reads is the New York Time’s Modern Love column. I have lost myself innumerable times for multiple hours reading through 15 years of beautiful, revelatory personal essays.
The series has expanded to a book, a podcast, and a TV show, as well as to an alternative written word format - Tiny Love Stories. The premise is simple - to tell your love story in 100 words or less. In the middle of this fraught time - deployment, new baby, global pandemic, cuts at work, horrors of racism overflowing and painfully becoming visible to a broader, whiter public, a nation in free fall - I tried my hand at a tiny love story as a way to process and memorialize one of my current everyday experiences.
My 2-year-old daughter extends a forkful of scrambled eggs to my phone on its tripod; Charles opens his mouth on the other side of WhatsApp and pantomimes taking a bite. She yells “Hug! Daddy!” as she picks up the phone, embraces it, and plants a messy kiss on the screen while my mom makes our 6-month-old laugh. His deployment, the one that should have ended 4 weeks ago, has been extended for an unknown duration due to COVID-19. On month six, from across ten time zones, he continues to postpone his dinner to share breakfast with our children.
I submitted this, and am doubtful it will be selected for publication. It is not elegant, it is not funny nor witty, it is lacks narrative. What is the love story? Is it between daughter and father? Wife and husband? Mother and mother? Between all of us? Regardless of its clumsiness, this is an experience that I would like to capture but have struggled with how to do so; the short format is a good exercise and provides a simple framework with which to do it. To capture a tender, chaotic moment. To capture the oddness of how we stay in touch, how my daughter expresses her love and desire for connection by hugging a phone as a substitute for hugging her father, the sorrow I feel in this, my thankfulness that we are able to stay in near-constant contact. To capture my grief in my husband missing out on some of the best bits of our family - the minutiae of our day, the joy of our growing children. To capture how I find thick swipes of our breakfast on my phone almost daily. Odds are that I will try another one.
Note - another new-to-me favorite is the NYT’s Metropolitan Diary series, which I honestly may like more than Modern Love at the moment. These little anecdotes are refreshing and cool - brief insights into contemporary and decades-old behavior between people and the city. It can sometimes make me wish I had been born and raised in New York to be able to experience and contribute to this collective memory. (Bagels! Pigeons! The subway! Skyscraper-lined avenues! Bodegas! Sidewalks and stoops!)
