Saturday 13 February 2010

Be Mine


One of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies, The Godfather (Part I), is when Michael (Al Pacino) takes a walk over the sun-parched landscape around Corleone, Sicily, and sees Apollonia (Simonetta Stefanelli) for the first time. He stops in his tracks. Their eyes meet. She stops in hers. His bodyguards observe that he has been struck by il fulmine (the thunderbolt).

It is l'amore a prima vista (love at first sight) and sometimes it happens outside of novels and movies.

My mother-in-law, who recently turned 90, needed a way home for the Thanksgiving holidays of 1941. A friend of hers asked his buddy, a handsome Annapolis Naval Academy graduate, and owner of a new bullet-back black Buick, if they could offer her a ride. He agreed.

She was a statuesque beauty of 5'9", with clear blue eyes, porcelain skin, and a classically elegant way of dressing. She remembers that she was wearing a beige sweater that "showed off my figure, but not too much, because I was a schoolteacher."

When she met the young naval officer, she says, "I never had a man look at me the way he did, before or since."

Feigning ignorance of the roads, the officer asked his friend to take the wheel and he got into the back seat with my mother-in-law. She tells us they talked a little bit, and then "we kissed all the way from Washington, DC to Richmond."

They decided within a week that they would be married the following June. Their plans changed on December 7, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese and the United States entered World War II. They married instead on December 26, 1941, barely six weeks after meeting each other.

My father-in-law died in 1989, two years short of their 50th wedding anniversary.

I'm thinking of other scenarios, in films and real life, where chemistry ignites, often unexpected:

* On a government plane, a high-powered man and woman leaned over to clean up spilled popcorn from the floor, met each other's eyes and felt a deep connection. They married a year later.

* In the film Moonstruck, Loretta (Cher) and Ronny (Nicholas Cage) fell madly and unexpectedly in love though she was engaged to his brother, Johnny (Danny Aiello). She broke her engagement and they were married.

* A seemingly aloof Senate staffer noticed a woman lobbyist one day and tracked where and when she would be at a congressional hearing so he could meet her. They've been married for 27 years.

I know, I know, this blog post might meet with a snicker or two. There are lots of stories of unrequited love, chemistry lost, infidelity, and even love at first sight gone wrong (Romeo and Juliet).

But it is Valentine's Day tomorrow, so I'm taking the rosy approach in hopes that all of you know, have known, or will know at least a little of what I am writing about.

Whether you are with a partner or not, tomorrow is the day to eat chocolates out of a heart-shaped box, watch romantic movies and revel in and/or remember those loving feelings. You haven't lost them (apologies to The Righteous Brothers).

Happy Valentine's Day.