This is Not a Love Song. Love My Way. Godfather. Polar Bears Love Seals.

--Mary Kay Latourneau was on Larry King Live. She’s the school teacher who had a baby by one of her 13 year old students; went to jail; had part of her sentence suspended, got out and slept with him again, creating another baby; and then had to serve the rest of her sentence.

That begin eight years ago. Now the student is grown, Mary Kay is out of jail, and they are planning on getting married.

And I don’t believe in love stories, but isn’t that one?

Whatever is between them has kept itself alive for eight years.
He didn’t outgrow it.
She didn’t give in to the system that tried all that time to teach her what she had was sickness, that would have given her her freedom if she would have given off even the illusion of having reached that conclusion.

On Larry King, she was certainly articulate and seems balanced—not the crazy woman we all at first thought she was.

Does it happen every now and then that two people meet and that kind of love you read about happens?

--The last time I fell in love it was for no good reason I could see.

There was nothing particular about her that would draw me into those depths, nothing, at least, on which I can put my finger. She was pretty enough, but physically she was less my type than many others. There was an openness to her heart, but there was also a visible dishonesty to counteract that.

So what made me love?
I still don’t know.

--And how will it happen to me again?
Through accident?
The persistence of some woman?
Some true and instant love, the kind I’ve heard in songs and witnessed in movies will descend on me?
Through my weakness?
Through my choice?


--In Manitoba, Canada, residences are being advised not to dress as seals for Halloween, because it is the migration season of the polar bear, and seals are their favorite dish.

I don’t know if the inherent insult to intelligence in that warning falls more on the heads of the people or the bears.

--I watched the Godfather saga for the first time in years.

More than anything, it stands as representation of Coppalo’s vision of a man’s inner world, or at least the fantastical one, where the laws of the jungle have been refined but still apply, and where a man can justify doing whatever he feels he must to keep control, because the battle always rages, and the women never understand.

--A recently divorced friend tells me she worries about her son and what he might have inherited from his father. “I have to remind myself sometimes that I am in him too,” she said of her son.

And I think: It’s the opposite with me. When I worry about a darkness lurking in my son, I remind myself that his mother is in him too.

--How slowly we change, and how little good we worry it will do when we believe it is as much in the blood as in the modeling.

Baby monkeys will reach over a snake to get something they want. They don’t know better.

However, if they see even a video tape of a grown monkey acting frightened of and avoiding the snake, then so too do the baby monkeys. They will no longer reach over a snake to get what they want.

Interestingly, if they see a video tape of a grown monkey acting afraid of and avoiding something that is harmless, like a bunch of flowers, the baby monkeys do NOT mimic what they have seen. They do not avoid the flowers.

What it suggests is that knowledge of the danger of the snake is in the monkey already, but that if the monkey doesn’t see that knowledge modeled, it doesn’t surface.

--I tell myself: Some day I will be worthy of everything for which I’ve been falsely admired Some day some one will find gems in the ashes of the respect others have left behind.