I’ve watched probably thirty or so Clint Eastwood films in the last month, either ones he starred in or directed, and many of them both. Clint turns 94 next week, same day as Laura, and I reckon I was paying tribute to him in some way. Listen: I love the guy. He’s one of my favorite dudes.

Thing is, I’m running out of Easwtood movies! But I finally sat down and watched HONKYTONK MAN, which I’d never even heard of before. It’s not a hidden masterpiece or anything, but it’s funny and often beautiful and wholly sincere, as is pretty much everything he’s directed. For all its sweetness, it’s probably also the biggest bummer of them all . . . when it ended, I thought: “Clint!!!”

Anyway, as for me, I’m very careful about saying that thing to someone, lest I miscalculate it. It’s easy to do that. I think once a very long time ago now I dropped the L bomb when I wasn’t fully there on account of a guilt I had that the girl had said it first . . . she’d waited some time for me to say it back and I knew it was hurting her that I had not. I know she meant it and when I said it, I meant it too, so maybe that’s all that matters. I certainly didn’t lie about it. What good would that have done us? Many years later I wonder if it’s childish to even consider a distinction between the “types” of love anyway. But if I were to borrow someone else’s words to describe what exactly it is I felt, these are the ones I would use:

. . . The young woman smiled dreamily as she went on about the storm, and he looked at her in amazement and something akin to shame: she had experienced something beautiful, and he had failed to experience it with her. The two ways in which their memories reacted to the evening storm sharply delimit love and nonlove.

By the word “nonlove” I do not wish to imply that he took a cynical attitude to the young woman, that, as present-day parlance has it, he looked upon her as a sex object; on the contrary, he was quite fond of her, valued her character and intelligence, and was willing to come to her aid if she ever needed him. He was not the one who behaved shamefully towards her; it was his memory, for it was his memory that, unbeknown to him, had excluded her from the sphere of love.

I could love someone again. I’m fully capable of it now. Truthfully I don’t think I was for a long stretch of time. So at least I’ve got that going for me.