This is a referendum on the poor choices that 51% of the electorate made in 2004…

It’s a real mandate for change, instead of a Supreme Court-delivered sham victory grotesquely twisted to allow a group of diabolical men to wreak havoc on the United States under the guise of a “mandate from the voters”…

It’s my generation standing up and saying, We’ve done this your way for 40 years. It’s not working. It’s our turn.

This is about realizing that it’s Christian to stop worldwide hunger, pollution, rape, and needless death at least as much as it is to blindly prohibit abortion.

This is me saying I didn’t just vote Obama for selfish reasons — I did it for my mom, and for my grandmother, because I believe he is the right choice for young and for old, for Americans.

It’s my answer to four years of asking, America, do we misunderstand each other so fatally?

This is me having my Michelle Obama “proud” moment. Not just feeling patriotic about living in a country where civil liberties most people only dream of are guaranteed; the pride that must have been felt by greater generations when they realized their achievements were more than the sum of their parts.

This is about the right to belief being contingent upon upholding the Constitution that protects it.

This is the first day of the end of Republican anti-intellectualism. This is the rejection of Karl Rove’s tactics. This is the moment when attitudes of individuals around the nation will start to shift as they learn that the quality of a person’s mind is more nuanced than the color of his skin.

This is not going to fix everything, but it’s a start.

Champ: What’s it like, Ron?
Ron: The intimate times? Outta sight, my man.
Brian: No, the other thing. Love.
Brick: Yeah, what is that?

In Anchorman, of course, the group begins singing “Afternoon Delight.” I stop at the question posed. What is love? seems like an overwrought blog topic, but it’s something I’ve pondered lately. Love, relationships, and how the two go together. What is love, and why does it matter, and what does it do?

The story of how my parents met is one I remember well, despite that they are now divorced and can’t stand one another. My mom and I lived in an apartment complex, and there was this obnoxiously loud, souped-up VW Beetle in the neighborhood. My mother cursed it constantly. When a radiologist from Bethesda Naval asked her on a date, my mom was shocked to discover that her date was the owner of that vented, chrome-exhausted monstrosity. In fact, she would ride in that vehicle to her first date with the man who would marry her, eventually adopt me, and with whom she would raise my little brother, Michael. They loved romantically and they married.

But, as I said, their marriage ended fifteen years later. And it hasn’t exactly been my model for healthy relationships. That model has been my grandparents’ marriage, one that endured my Poppop’s military career throughout Scandinavia, Canada, and the U.S. Through hardships to include their inability to conceive (leading to the adoption of my mother and uncles), my Poppop’s medical residencies, and many others that have surely gone unspoken, my grandparents maintained a relationship that has forever made me believe in the existence of true love and true partnership. The two of them were in love, passionately and romantically and emotionally in love, until the day my grandfather died, and I suspect they will be always.

Until I spent last Sunday with my grandmother on a long car ride, it hadn’t occurred to me to ask how they’d met. I’m sure I’ve heard the tale before, but I asked for a refresher anyway. Because I missed my Poppop, and because I’m still curious about love. My Mommom started the following story:

“When I graduated college, I was going on to teach science. But, I felt that I should have one year of practical lab experience before lecturing students.” At this point, it becomes apparent that my grandmother is a genius. Moving on…

“This was when Poppop was a first-year resident, and we would see each other around the lab. There was this handsome, handsome dark-skinned black man, African with beautiful skin, at the bench. He and I would talk during labs, and one day he said, ‘can I ask you a question?’ I said, ‘well sure.’ He asked, ‘are you a Catholic,’ and I said ‘yes, I am.’ And then your Poppop asked me on a date, and I said no. He would always ask sort of at the last minute, on a Friday for a date on Saturday, and I already had a date. He almost didn’t ask the third time!”

So, he sent his friend out to scout? A wingman to see whether you were Catholic?! “Well yes, and it was a nice thing, because that was important to both of us!” And how long did they date? “We’d dated for three years when we were married.”

Following the genius comment, three things about this story immediately strike me: My grandparents were concerned, first and foremost, with their own development as persons and professionals, not snagging a mate. My grandmother really was following that advice she’s given me to not date exclusively. And their relationship, evidently, was based on their Catholic faith even from the very beginning.

Finally, we arrive at my pondering point: Love, God, and how the two might fit together. The quintessential explanation of God to children is that “God is love.” The definition of a Catholic marriage is two people, cleaved onto one another and entering into a covenant under God and the guidance of Jesus Christ. How do the three connect– love, God, and marriage? Is is that two people of faith who fall in love make a good match for marriage? Or is it that love is created out of a marriage of two people of faith? The difference is enormous. The first is entering into a partnership with someone you love. The other is building love with a partner and God, or through God, maybe because of God.

So what is that? I feel sure I know love, but now I’m wondering whether there’s something else. And whether that love I’ve felt is the same thing that held my grandparents together for so many years. There was certainly romance– I’ll never forget an evening in the car with my grandfather, who called my grandmother with the Rat Pack-esque one-liner “Hello, Gorgeous” and held her enrapt on the other end of the line. That’s part of love, too. It’s got to be. I could hear her swooning over her husband of 25 years.

It has been said that love has the power to transform. I wonder if it is what transforms ordinary people into successful married couples. It’s worth pondering in an age when half of all marriages end in divorce. It’s worth questioning what our priorities are even when we date, if a marriage is eventually what we’re looking for. I wonder if we’re currently going about this dating thing all wrong. And I wonder why it seems like a different era altogether when people might say to one other, “This is who I am, these are my beliefs, and eventually I’d like to meet the person I’ll marry.”

Well, when I figure this all out, I’ll let you know. Somebody let me know I’m not alone in considering the subject.

This is not to say they weren’t supportive of her individual wishes; they were, and are. There were just some choices she would rather not have garner their disapproval, and she acted accordingly. This was completely alien to me. My attitude– and advice to her– was consistently, “screw what your parents think, they’ll get over it, just do what you want.” I never truly understood not only the function but the feeling of duty to one’s parents until now.

My mother and her mother came over to help me prepare for the move into the warehouse. For those who are new to the discussion, I decided to move into an artists’ colony in a warehouse in East Baltimore’s Station North arts district. I would be spending all of my time writing, producing textile arts, and pursuing my journalistic career.  So my mom and my grandmother come over to my apartment, one floor of an old rowhome, to help me pack.

All the while, they’re asking questions. I try to break the idea in gently. Yes, it’s in a rougher area. Yes, I have a gated parking lot inside the building. Yes, we have elevator keys. Yes, my cat is coming with me. Yes, they are really nice people.  The area’s on the upswing. It’s just received a special designation from the City and a lot of money is being funneled its way… And then they ask me if we can go drive by and see it.

This puts me at a distinct disadvantage. First of all, my mother’s terrified of my neighborhood now. There are more people here than in our entire town.  Also, I don’t have keys yet. That means I can’t pop into the gated lot, go up the elevator, and show off the comparatively clean, pleasant, welcoming space inside the warehouse. I just have to show off the Baltimore office of Social Services, weeds in the sidewalks, and the chicken & lake trout shop adjacent to the boarded-up warehouse that neighbor the Copycat. But I acquiesce, rationalizing that they have to see it sometime, so why not now?

To call the tension “palpable” as we cruised up Guilford Ave and out of the comparative glory of Mount Vernon would be an embarassing understatement. My mother’s eyes bulged behind her sunglasses. My placid, comforting grandmother became snippy as I nervously shouted last-minute turn instructions and tried to figure out what to say to these people. They were mostly silent as we circled the warehouse, me pointing out the large windows and how the surrounding buildings were– mostly– coming up, too. We saw a hipster art girl walk into the warehouse; bonus points for me, showing it’s inhabited by young people like myself.  My grandmother suggests we circle the building again. These women become ominously silent. I know they are scheming.

When we return to my apartment, my grandmother parallel parks and ensures the doors are locked. The seatbelts come off and my mom and grandmother turn to face me in the backseat, selecting their words as if each were choosing the proper filleting knife for a particular fish. They want to be sure. My grandmother takes the more levelheaded route, addressing my financial concerns and telling me that it’s not a prudent course of action to move ‘backwards’– from living alone to having a roommate, from living in a secure area to one where I need a gated parking space. I fumble out something about artist types and how plenty of young people live there, and that it’s not that bad. My mom is interspersing this with comments about how unsafe the neighborhood looks, and how it’s not well-kept like Hampden or Camden or a surprising number of other Baltimore neighborhoods she seems to know by name. I’m still buckled in, sputtering uselessly about the experience, when my mom plays her pocket ace: my grandfather wouldn’t want me living in such an unsafe area. I dissolve completely into sobs, feebly telling my mother that she has just used an unfair trump card. In my weakened state, they are able to quickly apply parent logic to everything– practically throwing money at me to assuage my financial concerns related to living in the apartment of a salaried young journalist when I have become a bartender, promising to come back tomorrow and help me redecorate, and making me promise I won’t move.

And unlike every single time I was ever told “no” before, as a child, as an adolescent, or as a young adult, I don’t fight them. I don’t tell them all the reasons they’re wrong about the neighborhood, and that I’ll prove them wrong, and I don’t care about their sleepless nights overdramatizing the dangerousness of the neighborhood.  I simply say, of course not. I won’t move. I’ll stay. I’ll swallow my pride and accept your help on some of my mounting bills. Somehow it just became crystal-clear to me that my indulgence is simply not worth whatever worrisome hell, real or imagined, I’d be putting them through. Strangest of all, I don’t feel conflicted or regretful. In the turn of that one moment, I simply lost all desire to do something that my mom and my grandmother don’t want me to do. Unexpectedly, I found out the meaning of filial duty.