Thirty years ago, I was asked to pen a column for my friend Boone’s music zine, The Trouble With Normal. He asked me to write a piece titled “The Trouble with Love” for his February issue. I was eager to share my salty thoughts about romance with the cool kids on the Gen X CoMo music scene. Until last year, I still had a copy of that zine because I loved what I wrote at the time. However, like most of my belongings, I have parted with it because, in my search for new purpose and place, I have let go of lots of things I once loved. 2024 was all about looking back in the most thorough manner possible, and then letting go of the things that I only thought I dearly loved and severely needed to keep forever. Living without a home for more than a year now, I have learned that I do not need, nor love, nearly so many things as I had once thought. The memories, the people, and the places I love will remain in my heart forever, but only a few very special things remain in my possession now.

I kept the letters from my grandmas that they sent to me while I was living in Los Angeles in the late 1980s. I loved them both so much. Receiving their letters in my mailbox from nearly 2,000 miles away thrilled me every time, even though they mostly wrote about the weather, the crops, and who was (or wasn’t) at church on Sunday. I kept the little silver jewelry box with my name engraved across the lid–a high school graduation gift from my first boss, who remains one of my dearest friends and mentors. I kept the Shirley Temple doll my mom gave me when I was four years old and obsessed with becoming a Broadway performer. I kept the playbills from every Broadway performance I’ve witnessed during trips to New York City, as well as a little brass bunny we found in a gift shop during my daughter’s first NYC trip. She was born in the year of the rabbit, and she will always be my little bunny. The figurine sits near my bed and reminds me when each day starts and ends that she is always with me in heart and mind, even though she is now a college graduate and I no longer live in the place where I raised her to adulthood. I kept the large jar filled with grains of sand and pieces of rock and shells collected from our trips to Malibu throughout my daughter’s lifetime. And, I kept every Valentine card ever made for me by my daughter. These are the sweetest love notes ever written, I genuinely love them.

I made a phone call to my favorite record store last August, professing that I would be delivering my vinyl collection to them. The very next morning, I called to let them know I had changed my mind, I would be keeping my records, because I love my albums. There is nothing so satisfying as dropping the needle on a record I’ve loved for fifty years and hearing the pops and crackles in the exact places where those songs popped and crackled when I was four or five or six.

The fate of my ever-expanding library of books that I lugged from Missouri, to California, to Missouri, to Oklahoma, and back to Missouri? I chose to part with them…well, most of them. My books have been pared down to a mere two shelves of my absolute favoritest favorites. I realized that as much as I loved reading those hundreds of books, I do not go back and reread them, the way I go back and listen to my albums again and again. Upon returning to my hometown, I have been reminded of how much I had loved the cozy and charming Carnegie Library where I spent so much of my childhood. Whenever I feel the need to reread any literary classics, I simply visit my local library now, which I love. I also kept my mattress because I do truly love sleeping alone on a California king where my long limbs can sprawl out in complete comfort. My Grandma Lane’s Victrola and my Grandma Pollard’s “good dishes,” several bins full of photos and a small pile of framed art are the only other things I love, and need, and kept when I gave up my home.

So, what exactly is the point of this Note from the Listening Gallery? At the age of 55, I now understand that love is indeed a many splendored thing. Love comes in far more varieties than the romantic one I was so eager to debase at 25. And while I still maintain the platform from which I composed “The Trouble with Love” essay I wrote in 1995–that not everyone needs romantic love–I can also now profess that everyone needs to love and to be loved in some form.

Love can be felt like a noun, shared like a verb, described like an adjective, and heck, it can even be expressed like an interjection. LOVE! is that indescribable experience when you held that little tiny baby in your arms for the first time, and every single time you see her or think about her for the rest of your life. LOVE! is that otherworldly experience of standing in the front row with someone who loves, loves, LOVES the music from that artist just as much as you do, and finally, after years of missing the show because you had to work, or you didn’t have enough money, there you are!! You are just a few feet away from that artist you both love, and they are pouring their heart out, and right into yours.

Love is the care we give to our aging parents, because they need us to return the nurturing they gave to us when we were young. It’s given when we make ham & beans with lots of freshly chopped white onion (even though it makes our eyes burn and our nose run) because it makes Mom feel loved, because that’s the way her mom made it for her…your grandma that you also loved. Even though she’s been gone for more than a decade now, you both still think of her every day. And, because you know, that one day, hopefully a day far from today, you’ll miss your mom terribly and you’ll cry far more than those onions made you cry, when she too is gone.

These days, via social media, we express our love through a heart emoticon nearly every day–for a funny meme, a cute cat video, a compelling quote from a favorite writer, or a photo of our cousin’s new grandchild that we will probably never meet because they moved to Florida decades ago. I love to post photos on social media of sweet memories from summer family reunions when the potato salad got rancid in the sun and I was covered with so many chigger bites that I scratched my legs ’til they bled in the back seat on the way home. But I didn’t care about any of that, because I loved every minute of running through the grass barefoot, chasing fireflies with cousins that I wouldn’t see again ’til the next 4th of July. Now, I love all the love emoticons that my cousins make on my posts.

For me, love makes a beautiful sound. I hear it when that song comes on the radio and I get goose bumps on my skin because it makes me remember something or somewhere or someone or some moment I loved. Love is also the songs that remind me of the people that makes me feel safe, or understood, or just utterly and completely happy. I have always been in awe of artists who can weave words and music together into a magical tapestry that so purely and gently expresses that ethereal thing called love...

Without despair, we will share in the joys of caring.

If we’re ever parted, I will keep the tie that binds us and I’ll never let it break ’cause I love you.

More than this? You know there’s nothing more than this. Tell me one thing more than this. No, there’s nothing more than this.

Who’s gonna pay attention to your dreams?

Sometimes we’ll sigh, sometimes we’ll cry and you know why, just you and I know true love ways.

Maybe I won’t be so afraid. I will understand how everything has its plan…either way, I’m gonna stay right by you.

You gotta give a little, take a little, let your poor heart break a little…that’s the story of, that’s the glory of love.

As long as long as old men sit and talk about the weather, as long as old women sit and talk about old men, I’m gonna love you forever and ever, Amen.