the history of love

One of my favorite books - quite possibly my favorite of all time - is called The History of Love. The gracious JD introduced me to it last year, and let me borrow one of her copies. I read it, loved it, shelved it (with the intention of returning it). Then, when I was packing for Argentina, I decided to bring books that I'd already read and had become favorites of mine... my reasoning was twofold: 1) I knew I'd like them, so I wouldn't be wasting precious packing space with bad reading material, and 2) they'd be a form of comfort, like a pair of worn sweatpants, but for the mind.

Okay, I feel like I'm backtracking. The point is, the first time I read the book, I loved it, but I didn't feel completely blown away, like I thought I might after hearing JD's reaction to it. But then I spent my first week in Argentina sitting in a corner booth of a little cafe, drinking coffee, watching the city go by on the dark, cold, winter streets, feeling lonely, and re-reading The History of Love. I was enamored, engrossed, amazed. So pulled in that I let my coffee get cold as my hot tears fell onto the worn pages of this beautiful book.

I'm not going to give you a review, or a summary, or a character analysis, because to me this book can't be reduced down to any of those things. To me it is love and loneliness and longing and loss... humor and tenderness, friendship and fragility. It is all that and so much more, expressed in thousands of letters arranged into sentences that echo through your mind long after they've passed your lips.

So, when I decided to do a listening comprehension exercise with the students at San Tarsicio, I couldn't help but choose an excerpt from this book. I chose a section that briefly describes a love story that begins in Poland and ends in America during World War II. I thought it might be a little too deep, a little too difficult to follow, especially for a bunch of pre-teen Argentine kids. It makes me so happy to say that I was sorely mistaken. I read three pages to them, and I have never heard that classroom so quiet. They were on the edges of their seats, looking at me with wide eyes, their lips tight lines of bated breath.

It was one of the most peaceful, beautiful moments I've had here - sitting in front of a classroom of impressionable children, the windows open to the sounds and smells of springtime, my favorite book in my hands, reading out loud. I wanted to share a part of myself with my students before I left, and although talking about Minneapolis did that on some level, reading a book that defines the emotions I felt my first weeks here - a book with pages salty from my tears - seemed so much more meaningful. Most of them will probably forget me, and The History of Love, but my hope is that I, and those three pages, have somehow secured a place among their already-fading childhood memories.

I've been waiting until the end of my stay in Buenos Aires to read The History of Love for a third time. I want to see if it will hold a different meaning for me at the end of my time here than it did at the beginning; I want to touch the same pages that I did nearly five months ago, let the same words dance through my mind. I've thought about going back to that same little cafe, but somehow that doesn't seem right - I haven't been there since those first dark days, and maybe there's a reason for that.

Instead I think I'll sit in the sunshine in the city's rose garden, my favorite place in Buenos Aires, with a smile instead of tears, a heart aching with joy instead of loneliness, and the knowledge that I -- that we -- will look back on these past few months as just one of many chapters in our very own history... a history with an excitingly large number of pages yet to fill.