"The Possibility of Love"

My title is a quote from Jeannette Winterson's wonderful memoir "Why be Happy When you Could

be Normal?" She writes about her relationship with her adoptive mother, Mrs Winterson and her ultimately successful attempt to find her biological mother. It is also in my opinion, an extended love letter to her lover Susie Orbach, with whom she started a relationship as she was writing this book. She says in the memoir that in response to Susie's bestseller: "The Impossibility of Sex", (which she read before she met her), she had thought of writing a book called "The Possibility of Love." And this is partly what her book is about.

It made me think about the different ways we can express love and how the digital age gives us even more possibilities. About 30 years ago, Nancy Kline and Christopher Spence wrote "At Least a Hundred Principles of Love". Pity I didn't buy it when I could - probably a collector's item by now. I wonder whether attending the big events in one's family like weddings and important birthdays figured as a principle on their list? I somehow doubt it. But it certainly figures on the lists of some members of my immediate family! So when my brother who lives in London, recently celebrated an important birthday, it put me in a quandary I hadn't foreseen. My family knows me well enough and they excuse me when it comes to weddings (because I don't believe in marriage) or circumcisions (I boycott them!) but I can hardly muster a political objection to the birthday of a beloved brother. I spent a couple of days looking at flights and then my sister came up with a brilliant idea. We could collect memoirs and photos of my brother from family members and friends and compile a photobook as a surprise gift. It would be more lasting and memorable than turning up for a few days to attend a dinner and exchange a few pleasantries with cousins one hardly ever sees.

So I went into the organizing of this surprise with gusto. And my partner - who is a digital wiz - searched out photobooks online.
We set a deadline for contributions - everyone of the 22 people we asked wrote something. We had his wife and daughters on board, one of whom went into his folder of photographs and stole a few choice items. But between just a few of us we had more than we needed. A few people wrote pages, whilst others were brief, some had me bursting out laughing, others were touching and had me in tears. One person remembered an alter ego of his and created a fantasy piece of writing as an elaborate joke. His daughters wrote very moving tributes which gave a comprehensive picture of what a hands-on father he has always been and still is. My brother has had a great impact on the lives of people close to him. Does he know this? Perhaps. But he doesn't see anything surprising or extraordinary about it, because when I asked him if there were any surprises for him in the pieces we wrote, he couldn't come up with anything much other than the gift itself. He hailed it the secret of the century! This is partly because it arrived late - that is 4 days AFTER his birthday. That meant that everyone at his birthday dinner knew about the book, had written in it and didn't have a whole lot of extra tributes to make on the night - which made for some embarrassment. Nevertheless, the secret was kept.

It was a great joy to be involved in compiling such a gift. From reading each person's piece as it came in to scanning slews of photographs and then with excitement mounting, setting up two computers to talk to each other and another two receiving or sending e-mails. The two of us spent 3 days putting the book together and to bed. The infinitely patient work of uploading I left to my partner. When it was done, we both felt we had never given anyone a better birthday present. It helped that I have been close to my brother all my life and have had holiday adventures with him and his family, which have produced some classic pictures. But more than all of that, to do this and for it to have meaning you have to absolutely adore the person! Then every task has a rich timbre to it - a tapestry of memory, the interweaving of lives, the same story told from different viewpoints, events forgotten and thus gladly remembered. I was in a heightened emotional state for most of the 3 weeks I was involved with it. My early 20's - the last time my siblings and I came and went from a family home - were suddenly foregrounded. I remembered Kurt Vonnegut's idea of a karass from "Cat's Cradle" - a book we liked in those years almost as much as J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye". "A karass is a group of people who, often unknowingly, are working together to do God's will. The people can be thought of as fingers in a Cat's Cradle."

So I created a community with the contributors - letting them know how we were progressing. I was sure they all wanted to know what his reaction was when he first saw it. How were we going to arrange that? Opening his post with the morning coffee wasn't going to work for us. We knew what day it was arriving and his younger daughter intercepted it. A flurry of e-mails and then we had to wait 'til he got home in the evening. After he'd eaten she handed the package to him and got her cellphone camera ready...

Then she wrote, "I think he is very overwhelmed and only just realising some of what this book contains, but yes definitely worth waiting for. I think this will be a few days/weeks worth of reading for him and taking it all in. He's in the process of working out where different photos come from and retelling random stories!"
Some minutes later he called. He said he was too overcome by surprise to read anything yet, but he added that "with such evidence it isn't possible to doubt that I am loved".

One can't really do better than that, can one?






































'