Love is limitless

June 5, 2008

Dear Leslie,

When my niece Kim heard DC and I were getting married, now almost 15 years ago, she asked if that meant I didn't love her anymore. I reassured her that love is the only thing in the world that has no limits. That the more love you give, the more you create for everyone, including yourself.

Grant that I may not so much seek to be loved as to love, Saint Francis said, for it is in giving that we receive. It's that simple and yet hard for us to believe.

Kim graduated from high school last weekend in Cincinnati. She's going to Ohio State like her brother did and plans to become a doctor.

The tradition in Cincinnati is for parents to throw a party for their high school graduate. Sometimes graduates and their parents go to two or three house parties a day in the week after school ends. Hundreds attend. The guests at Kim's party ate barbecue, played a bean bag game called Cornhole and sat around a fire pit talking. That started at 6:30 p.m. The last guest went home at 4 a.m.

We Missouri visitors couldn't party with the Ohioans. My parents went to bed at 10 p.m. DC and I excused ourselves to go downtown to see the show "Jersey Boys," the musical based on the lives of the Four Seasons.

If you don't remember them, the Four Seasons were the blue collar alternative to the Beatles. Deep into the '60s, they wore sharkskin suits, sang doo-wop harmonies, smeared Brylcreem in their hair and performed unison dance steps when none of those was cool anymore. They didn't become rock stars. They just sold records.

Many in the audience could have answered a casting call for "The Sopranos." Some hairdos and dresses dated from the '60s. A burly middle-aged man in a loud madras sport coat escorted a bronzed blonde who wasn't his daughter but might have gone to school with her.

The show tells the stories of each of the Four Seasons through their songs. A couple of them were New Jersey street hoods. The group fought each other and radio programmers and overcame betrayals and divorces and tragedy to be inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.

But my musically savvy nephew had never heard of them.

I liked the Four Seasons. As I was becoming a teenager, I knew a sweet girl named Sherry, the title of their first hit. I wanted to know what it felt like to "Walk Like a Man." And I knew how the singer of "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" felt. Their songs were romantic and sounded heroic, even if sung in Frankie Valli's powerful falsetto.

The Beatles eclipsed the Four Seasons and most everyone else making music in the 1960s. The Four Seasons sang about romantic love. The Beatles did too but broadened our perspective. They understood that love does not define or demand, that love does not hold itself higher, that love knows no limits. "And in the end the love you take/ Is equal to the love you make," they sang. Saint Francis said so, too.

Kim was popular but didn't bother much with boys in high school. "Too much drama," she said. She had soccer and track and good grades. Now begins the adventure of finding out what love and life really are.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.