"Love is being taught to read Squirrel Nutkin and Tailour of Gloucester & Aesop's fables & Anansi the Spider, & Brer Rabbit & Alice Through the Looking Glass & Roald Dahl & Edward Gorey & Blake & Frost & Auden;
Love is being read Edith Head's mythology and passages of interest in my dad's current history or biography book sitting behind him watching the birds through the windowglass.
Love is Mummy cooking me her famous 'Welsh rabbit,' that doesn't actually have any Peters or Easter Bunnies in it cos it's actually from "rarebit" when unelided;
Love is learning new words every day as naturally as water flowing from our kitchen tap -- that only ever got shut off twice or thrice, for a couple hours when bills were tight,
and I'd watch as they quickly did one of their mysterious "cheque exchanges" and made things right.
Love is being spoken to with the richest and most beautifully descriptive and aptly-chosen vocabularies I will ever meet in any two persons, and who, with ease, simplicity, and concision, define every new intriguing word I ask them about that I haven't figured out from the context of our conversation;
Love is hearing me call smelly sprays "pewfrum" and turning it into our family word for the stuff, and asking if I want to order "the pascetti" at Manikas as we stroll down to Main Streetfor dinner cos I can't figure out how to say "spaghetti," yet.
Love is learning how to use commas and em—dashes and semi-colons: punchy, precise, punctuation! . . . Love is learning what elegance and flow and hypnotic mastery is possible, by varying the rhythmic lengths of my prose sentences, long, then short, then long or even longer than long again, then short.
Love is being cuddled,
Love is snowsuits and going sledding,
Love is playing catch and batting practice in the backyard even though Daddy was never coordinated at sports and has Osgood Schlaughter's disease and it hurts his knees to stand for any long duration, so I learned to throw it up in the air and bat it when it came back down while he watched sitting on the back deck stairs.
Love is singing in the car ride home, and being gently chided by Daddy when I sang "lugrubiously" so that now I have a pleasant clarity and tone and never fall into the temptation to mournful affectation or shmaltz;
Love is learning proper pitch by contrasting Daddy's beautiful basso profundo with Mummy's half-deaf tuning, and figuring out where she was trying to hit her notes that didn't land as they scrambled over topside almost higglety-piggity, as I would try to stifle my laughter because I hated to hear 'are you being cruel, laughing at me?!' . . . 'I can't help it and I'm helpless!' . . . 'We all have our limitations.' 'Oh to be young and beautiful and perfect! What is it like being perfect, Verity?!'
'Oh it's wonderful, Mama, I'm sorry you're not!' I would jest back as Daddy gruntled his Cat with a rub of the knee and a smile and a twinkle in his eye.
Love is tea and oaty digestive biscuits printed with their description right on them, followed by Yorkshire nursery rhymes in the bright winter's light under a down comforter and my
Cushy Mummy's beautiful, off-key Northern lilt lulling me as I nuzzle the warmth of her soft, plush body, her arms as pale and smooth as the flesh of an almond.
Love is staying up late for PBS' "Mystery!" and "Masturbate Theatre," with a cup of tea and a choccie biccie and a child hand's full of pink & green & yellow-accented black licorice all-sorts bought from the bulk sweets bins of the Windsor Mall and stashed in the treats drawer I wasn't to go in without permission.
Love is drawing each other's picture,
Love is reciting immortal poetry on an errand stroll,
Love is yard-saling on Saturdays and letting me do up my bedroom all in vintage wicker with a mock-Oriental deep blue area rug, and factory-lace floral-design curtains that makes the place look like a thrifty, down-at-heel genteel, possibly disgracefully disinherited, British-expat scraping along with a small pension in the Caribbean though I am 16 and have only ever been out of the country to visit the UK and Canada, heeheehee!
Love is recounting the town's historical characters and events walking in the Forest Hills graveyard covered in yellow, red, orange, and brown leaves, a stone's throw from the dormant peony garden in Nichols Arboreteum we visit in the late Spring when their rows are riotous with scent and colours.
Love is chocolate oranges in one's stocking, a lump of coal for tradition, and gold-foil wrapped chocolate coins with JFK's .50 cent coin-silhouette embossed upon them,
Love is birthday gifts wrapped in the Sunday funny pages,
Love is going to the grocery store the day or two after Valentine's to buy half-off bags of fancy chocolate boxes we would never pay full-price for!
Love is learning how electricity and combustion and steam engines and fuse boxes work, and Daddy teaching me how to turn off power and replace a knob-tube fuse in our Victorian wooden house,and be so good at it with my nimble little fingers that I do them everytime one blows while proclaiming "Let there be Light!" and feeling verrrry divine in my potence.
Love is asking how banks and money work, one evening in the sitting room by the cinnabar lamp, Daddy sitting in the grey velvet chair as I sat on its pouf, allotting me coasters with their 18th century-prints of ships on them bordered in shiny gold, and being shown by hand how the banks' loans, interest rates, mortgages, and checques work on an exchange market.
Love is then watching "Mary Poppins" and asking why the movie made the bankers look so exaggeratedly evil and why couldn't they explain to Michael that investing his pocket money in the bank would mean he could buy bread for the birds with the interest every month, instead of only feeding them that one tuppence time?!! . . . And having Daddy agree with me and feeling smart like I was "getting it", and then him teaching me how to say
"supercalifragilisticexpialidocous" 5x superfasttt and then even backwardz!
Love is money for the Scholastic book fair to buy new Calvin & Hobbes,
Love is a strawberry ice cream cone sitting on the wood bench outside 'Washtington Dairy' so the drippings landed on the pavement for the dogs nearby to lick while I raced to catch every drip I could before it plopped to its doom,
Love is learning how to make tuna fish sandwiches in Daddy's big green bowl for Saturday lunch, and cinnamon-sugar buttered toast in a brown paper bag for a decadent after-school snack;
Love is a scenic drive in the boonies on a perfect summer's day,
Love is my parents holding each of my hands and swinging me in the air as we walked to the 'pub libs," for more books and free magazines from the hand-me-down shelf, 'Highlights' for me if I was lucky, and 'New Yorkers' and 'Redbooks' for them,
Love is playing scary monster and reciting silly Little Willie poems and paradoxical rhymes about 'Two dead boys' who 'got up to fight/Back to back they faced each other/Drew their swords and shot each other,'
and spinning yarns about the Boogie Man, who I pictured living in a big old house at the edge of the woods, wearing an Edwardian outfit of waistcoat and striped pants with a big black organ grinder's moustache, mute by choice and even scarier because of it!
Love is watching my parents be playful and flirtatious with each other while Daddy towel-dries Mummy's hair just how she likes it, vigororous and firm,
Love is playing dress-up in great grandmum's old velvets and taffetas and not getting yelled at,
Love is seeing the Nutcracker at the Michigan Theatre,
Love is a watercolour set,
Love is a picnic by the river with lemonade and frozen peas to throw at the ducks,
Love is dancing in a swimsuit in late spring downpours,
Love is learning how to double-knot tie a bow for my shoes,
Love is the Rocky & Bullwinkle set on VHS and all the Disneys available,
Love is taking the day off school for mummy's hiking club cookie exchange, and again on Mardi Gras for paçzki,
Love is letting me get a Veronica Lake haircut in fourth grade after getting brambles in my hair; and letting me tint it magenta in high school, and driving me to middle-school most mornings so I could sleep in and listen to 89x alternative on the drive there even though it was "horrible noise";
Love is calligraphy lessons,
Love is summer camp,
Love is costume parties, and being allowed to attend mum's 'Alternatice Miss America' pageant when I was old enough to play along, and Mummy's co-birthday Burns' Night with bag-pipers and Laurel's splendid playing on her enormous, intricately-carved harp, and so many mezzo-sopranos who dazzled with glamour and beauty in their 50s and 60s and into their 70s,
grande dames proclaiming their Red Rose joy, their love 'like a melody that's sweetly sung in tune.'
Love is a purple bicycle with streamers and training wheels and going two blocks around all by myself!
Love is refrigerator boxes turned into porch cave-nests with window flaps,
Love is playing bog-witch by taking a big stick and stirring the leaves that pooled in the brown-mud puddles of the driveway after a heavy rain, even though it was messy and smelly,
and being allowed to hide in the giant front bushes and play spy on all the legs I watched go by and even get away with making odd chirrupy noises to confuse the oblivious students so important in their haste.
Love is Daddy rescuing an orange milk crate from the alley and setting it up by the base of beech tree next to the house, so I could climb it even when he wasn't there to give me a boost to the first high branch.
Love is letting me doodle on the antique Ann Arbor organ and piano, even though they were very out of tune, and figuring out how to play Chopsticks and Ode to Joy by ear, even though it was far from its normal melodiousness.
Love is packing a banana box and blankets and pillows so I could nest all snuggled when Daddy gave his slide shows on historic log cabins and remarkable tombstones and train-station postcards;
Love is Daddy taking me to Kroger's almost every night for a year and more, with a grabber tool to fish out receipts while asking for them from big shoppers to redeem as part of a promotion for school computers; we would bring them to Bach elementary in big banana boxes, rolled up and tied in rubberbands, and I remember my surprise when the principal Ms. Oakley, who I also knew as her superhero '60s Robin-coloured costumed altar-ego, Zero the Hero, came out of her office and greeted my Dad with a giant hug and a kiss on both cheeks and words of gratitude, calling him a 'saint,' which he was, in his hermit-y atheist way; he couldn't attend worship at Quaker Meetinghouse with Mum though she wished it, because he would start to snore and disturb the silence and she'd elbow him and he'd startle awake and make funny bewildered "huh?!!" noises in his daze.)
Love is then learning math factors by playing Number Crunchers, and how food chains work by playing Odell Lake, and how people die of dysentery and cholera and not buying extra wheel axles on Oregon Trail, tapping away on a Macintosh with the rainbow apple logo and to its right, a little brass plaque that read the computer's presence was "thanks to Wystan Stevens" my father, who redeemed enough to award us with six of the machines in the lab, so many that Kroger's discontinued the promotion.
Love is collecting boxtops and taking them in to the schools I used to attend, even though I was off to college by then.
Love is learning not to be embarrassed about most things, especially not Mummy farting copiously without dropping a beat in the middle of a conversation at Ann Arbor Book & Supply as I shrank away to the aisle behind us pleading with her to leave, and her acquaintance trying to keep up and pretend nothing unusual was going on.
As I asked in shock and dismay on the way home, "Aren't you embarrassed at allll?!" She exclaimed, "I'll tell you something about me, I am neverrr embarrassed!!! I reefuuuuuuse to be embarrassed!!" (Though she did chortle and smile upon my retelling the story to Daddy and then repeated her mantra of non-embarrassment)
and she then made a habit of telling me where and when she farted in public when I got home from school. "I had a lovely fart in Borders today. It was big and loud and smelly! And after I did it, I looked over at a man reading his book and everyone looked where I was looking, and they thought HE did itt! And he was none the wiser!"
Love is watching "My Fair Lady" and being so veddy impressed at the power of self-transformation and the magic of good manners, that I began to offer my hand to shake to Mummy's friends while saying "How do you do?" and "How kind of you to let me come!" when attending their gatherings.
Love is ballet and modern dance lessons and neighborhood block parties that ended with catching fireflies,
Love is finding a mason jar of them with the top punched through with airholes by Daddy next to my dollhouse a few days after my first-ever catching of them, that I had carelessly forgotten about as I didn't have any pets, and being so worried that I was a horrible murderer of enchanting creatures, but Daddy being super clever and having me fill up a cap full of pop for them to drink on the porch and watching them gain strength over the hour of sipping and the them flying swiftly away from my neglect, starting a family in the quad across Huron street,
so that they and their descendents blinked their greetings for decades after, my little kidnapped hobos new and beautiful paradise of a home, studded with white appleblossom trees fragrant and almost ethereal for all their hardy, hearty rootedness.
Love is skipping stones and prancing in the waves and looking for Petoskey stones in Muskegon,
Love is finding railroad ties behind that same beach,
Love is coming home from food shopping and bringing in the bags, then slipping away to swirl around the front yard on starry, cloudless nights with the moon shining bright, my arms outstretched as I sang from the Sound of Music, earnest in my mystical meditation,
Love is typing out my animist musings on watermarked paper on Daddy's electric typewriter and recording my florid love poetry on tape-casettes and a portable recorder he had used to store the recollections of my Oma and Opa's lives and the oral histories of old people of our town.
Love is watching 'Our Town' in high school with Daddy and being so upset and angry at fate when spoiler alert! . . . Emily dies in childbirth, and Daddy explaining how he got into local, Ann Arbor history by reading "Spoon River Anthology" and realising how every life in every little town is precious, unique, and poignant; the details of their specific place and time and happenings illustrating a microcosmos that reflected the whole universe of human striving; making, mending, mating, and mayhem. I would finally fully understand his devotion years later, when I read Munro and the stories of meandering lives punctuated by moments of deep significance, both afflicted and blessed by chance and circumstance, of women working and loving and struggling and stifling in small towns in rural never-heard-of-its, with occasional moves to the bright lights, big city of Toronto, birthplace of my future husband, Canadian as they come, but international in his superior intellect, like Ontarian Alice herself: dry in wit and sharp in observation.
Love is visiting Mum's friend's Joan's cross-country two storey-ceiling, window wall ski cabin up North, next to a small lake, and playing Scrabble after a snowshoe hike and pan-fried dinner; every night a long, luxuriant soak in the giant jacuzzi tub with working jets, and bedding down in the exotic, rarefied realm of a cosy, dark warren of a loft bed in the remotest corner.
Love is a birthday party with chocolate & vanilla ice cream cake iced with a blue bonnet girl like the stained glass hanging in our bay window, and a clown named Dot who blew me up a giraffe balloon, and a table so heaped with presents I thought they must be for all of us kids; coloured chalk, bubble-making kit, sand-art set, and pencils, markers, and paint!
Love is a fancy tea party with millefeuille and more ice cream cake at my aunt's old 4th ward brick polling place, etched all over with the graffiti of a hundred year's worth of students scrawling their names in the Student Union tables, and searching for a brick that hasn't already been filled, no luck but some initials were left by my classmates,
here and there.
Love is caravanning to a pizza party at MARVIN'S MARVELOUS MECHANICAL MUSEUM with tokens for the penny arcade for every guest when I turned 9 or 10?
Love is taking all my friends and me for manicures and more pizza, at the Beauty School at 11 or 12?
Love is a sweet 16 with my friends on the second floor and the adults down below, and one of the oldheads peeking in to visit just as Fatboy Slim's "Fatboy Slim is fucking in heaven" playing a hundred freaking times on the boombox and him pretending
he didn't notice and chuckling with the grown-ups of how bashful we'd been to be caught with such a provocative track on!
Love is building a snowfort with little cubbies carved out to sit, love is being read D'aulieres Greek myths in a nook by a tree trunk fashioned into a squirrel's doll house and a mummy-looking plaster cast of my cousin sitting at a school desk beside it,
Love is taking the scenic routes so I could learn how to tell "Italian Eights" from French Second Empires, Greek Revivals from neo-Gothics, Queen Annes from Tudoresque, and Doric columns from Ionic, with bonus points for spotting Craftsman Egyptian columns that flute at the bottom rather than taper.
Love is renting Die Zauberflöte for me at 8 and 9 and encouraging me to love the right, the good, the brave and the
true;
Love is vowing to do my best in everything I do.
-- Verity Grace Auden-Stevens, a love poem dedicated to my parents, Wystan & Catharine Stevens, published today in honour of the profound and abiding fatherly love I carry with me wherever I go."
Yes. This is rich enough to support a fairly detailed interpretive profile of the longings encoded in the text—not a diagnosis of the author, and not a prediction of inevitable behaviour.
The first thing that strikes me is that the poem defines love not primarily as emotion, romance or sacrifice, but as:
attentive cultivation.
Love is teaching, noticing, naming, explaining, reading aloud, making things intelligible, making the world interesting, and taking a child’s mind seriously.
That suggests an adult longing not merely to be adored, but to be recognised as intellectually alive.
The central emotional equation
Throughout the poem, love repeatedly takes this form:
You noticed what delighted me, and you helped me become more fully myself.
The parents do not merely provide food, shelter and affection. They:
introduce language;
decode institutions;
encourage aesthetic taste;
tolerate eccentricity;
indulge imaginative play;
explain money, machines, architecture and history;
allow experimentation with appearance and identity;
treat curiosity as something precious.
So the imagined adult counterpart would probably be someone who does not merely say:
“I love you.”
but demonstrates:
“I have been paying close attention to what makes you come alive.”
That is a much more demanding standard.
Love as intellectual companionship
The density of literary, historical, musical and linguistic detail is not decorative. It appears to be one of the primary emotional languages of the household.
New words are given freely. Questions are answered. Puns become family vocabulary. Books, poems and cultural references create a shared private civilisation.
This strongly suggests a yearning for a partner who can function as:
interlocutor;
intellectual equal;
appreciative reader;
verbal playmate;
co-curator of meaning.
A person formed by this model may experience dullness, inattention or inability to follow references not merely as incompatibility, but almost as emotional deprivation.
To them, close reading may itself feel like intimacy.
Being misunderstood may feel like being unloved.
Love as witness
The poem is filled with tiny retained particulars:
the colour of lamps;
the shape of chairs;
the sound of voices;
household jokes;
snacks;
routes through town;
exact books and programmes;
the bodily texture of being held;
parental habits that would appear insignificant to an outsider.
This implies that love is closely associated with being remembered in detail.
Not generic approval:
“You’re wonderful.”
But:
“I remember the odd word you invented when you were four.”
That can produce an adult longing to be known almost archivally—to have one’s contradictions, stories, phrases and private mythology held in another person’s memory.
It may also create acute sensitivity to forgetting, inattentiveness, superficial responses or misquotation. If memory is love, being forgotten can feel like erasure.
Love as permission to be strange
The childhood depicted is unusually permissive of eccentricity:
bizarre games;
fanciful costumes;
unconventional hair;
linguistic experimentation;
occult-ish bog-witch play;
dramatic recitation;
strange humour;
artistic self-fashioning.
The child is not merely tolerated. Her oddness is treated as entertaining, intelligent and often admirable.
That suggests a deep adult longing for:
someone who does not merely endure her strangeness, but delights in it.
Someone who says, in effect:
“Your unusualness is not an obstacle to intimacy. It is one of the reasons intimacy with you is valuable.”
This may also explain why shame, conventionality or being treated as “too much” would be especially painful.
Love as refinement without humiliation
There is correction in the poem—but the correction is gentle, playful and offered as cultivation.
Pronunciation is adjusted. Singing is refined. Manners are taught. Punctuation is explained. Knowledge is expanded.
Crucially, the child is not described as being made to feel stupid for not knowing.
That suggests a particular ideal:
I want to be improved by someone who never makes me feel inferior.
This is quite different from wanting unconditional affirmation. The poem actively celebrates correction—but only correction delivered with warmth, wit and respect.
An adult formed by this might yearn for a person who can challenge her while preserving dignity. Conversely, criticism that feels cold, reductive or contemptuous may be experienced as a betrayal of what teaching and love are supposed to feel like.
Love as secure dependence
There is strong bodily and practical security throughout:
being cuddled;
being swung between parents;
being driven;
being fed;
being helped into trees;
being allowed to nest under blankets;
being protected from consequences without being shamed;
money troubles being resolved mysteriously and competently.
Even scarcity is narrated as manageable:
the water was briefly shut off, then the adults fixed it.
That creates a picture of adults as people who quietly restore order.
The child is allowed to remain imaginative because someone else is holding the structure.
An adult longing emerging from this might involve a desire for a partner who is:
competent;
calming;
practically reliable;
capable of handling systems;
strong without being authoritarian;
indulgent without being negligent.
In other words, a partner who permits regression into play because the environment remains safe.
Love as paternal recognition
The father is especially central as:
teacher;
historian;
explainer;
moral exemplar;
audience;
technical instructor;
source of wit;
source of intellectual validation.
His approval appears to have carried enormous weight. The repeated image of the “twinkle in his eye” signals a specific form of recognition:
“You understood the joke. You saw what I saw. You are one of my kind.”
That may create a lifelong yearning for an intimate partner who reproduces that look—not necessarily a literal father-substitute, but someone whose admiration confirms:
“You are clever, unusual, morally serious, and I recognise you.”
The ideal beloved may therefore be expected to combine lover, reader, teacher, co-conspirator and paternal witness.
That is a very difficult role for any one adult to fill.
Love as civilisation
The household described is almost a miniature republic of letters.
There are:
books;
music;
architecture;
local history;
manners;
machinery;
economics;
folklore;
sweets;
jokes;
public institutions;
eccentric rituals.
Love means being inducted into a world.
That suggests that adult love may be imagined not merely as a dyadic bond, but as:
building a shared culture together.
Private vocabulary. Ritual meals. Recurring jokes. Shared texts. A home filled with inherited symbols. A relationship that feels like its own small country.
This is why intellectual and aesthetic compatibility may matter so intensely. The beloved is not simply expected to love the person; they are expected to help sustain the civilisation.
What may be difficult in adult life
A childhood remembered this way can create beautiful capacities—but also very high relational expectations.
The person may seek someone who is simultaneously:
endlessly curious;
verbally gifted;
playful;
erotically compelling;
morally serious;
practically competent;
admiring;
non-shaming;
paternal without being controlling;
intellectually challenging without being critical;
attentive to every detail;
and capable of making ordinary life feel enchanted.
That person may exist in fragments across several people more readily than in one partner.
There may also be difficulty tolerating relationships that are loving but comparatively plain. If love was formed through stories, wordplay, ritual, education and aesthetic abundance, ordinary affection may sometimes feel insufficiently legible.
A partner might be caring, loyal and decent—but if they do not notice, interpret, remember and play, the care may not register fully as love.
The shadow side of this definition
The poem idealises childhood in extraordinary detail. That does not make it false. But idealisation can serve several functions.
It may preserve the parents as a lost homeland.
It may protect against grief.
It may create a moral benchmark against which later relationships inevitably fail.
It may also divide the emotional world into:
people who “get it”;
and people who are coarse, incurious, unimaginative or unworthy.
The longing may therefore be not just for love, but for restoration:
“Take me back into the world where I was seen, educated, indulged, protected and delighted in.”
No adult partner can literally restore childhood. But someone may spend years looking for a person who makes that lost atmosphere briefly reappear.
My strongest inference
The adult longing encoded here is not chiefly:
“Choose me.”
It is:
“Know me deeply, delight in what you find, teach me without shaming me, let me remain strange, and help me make the world meaningful.”
And beneath even that:
“Please recreate the experience of being cherished as a mind.”
That, I think, is the organising emotional principle of the whole piece.
The poem’s definition of love is extraordinarily generous, but also highly specific. Love is not passive acceptance. It is sustained, intelligent attention.
And that means the greatest adult fear implied by the text may not be abandonment in the ordinary sense.
It may be:
being seen only approximately.
