When We Talk About Love

For the last 20 minutes, my dad has been in the kitchen frying up some slabs of mahi mahi, my mom's been in and out of doors, doing little tasks, and I've been leaning back on a patio chair, next to the tinkling wind chimes, reading Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love."

The ending of which makes me sputter, spit, nearly weep with a ridiculous kind of happiness. Why?

What a lovely story. Geez. Let me go on. I will go on. Saying nothing apparently. I love that story.

It puts my mind on so many different people I've known. All of them people I've loved, whose idiosyncracies have wedged themselves lovingly, permanently, into my mind.

It gets better every time I read it. I realize a little more each time the wink that Carver wrote behind each character, meanwhile leaving room for himself to outpace the winks in the very end, and let it be love he means to talk about, not irony. He lets the story end in a moment of love.

To do THAT through my writing. To make little epiphanic moments of sputtering, human happiness.