It’s a Thursday. 2PM. Carson City, Nevada. I’m at the DMV. The line is seventy seven miles long. I’m holding up the back end of it without an ounce of patience. The line hasn’t moved since last week.
Hell, I’d rather have my wisdom teeth pulled wide awake by a clown whose missing a degree in dentistry than wait in a line as long as this.
Through the doors, I see a woman scurrying across the parking lot with a ham on rye sandwich from the local delicatessen in her hand. It’s windy as all hell and raining like heaven outside. Her pink umbrella is opened upside down as if a metallic flower were in full bloom. It’s collecting raindrops instead of repelling them. Her hands are full with responsibility. I head towards the door to open it for her.
But someone beats me to the punch.
It’s a young man standing in line with me. He just turned ten, and is wise beyond his years. He elbows his way around me and uses both arms to push the door open until it almost falls off the hinges.
“Why thank you kind sir,” the woman says, grinning a grin that could make satan give up sin.
Two younger ladies are strolling through the parking lot. The boy once again does his thing at trying to make the world a much sweeter place. They thank him with half a clumsy hug.
They even call him “handsome.” By his rosy red cheeks I think he really likes this.
Here comes another woman meandering toward the door looking at her phone. You should see the startled surprise on her face when the boy says “please, allow me ma’am.”
She giggles with a slight sigh, “well, aren’t you just a sweetie pie?”
He sure is.
His actions make me think back to a time when most boys looked forward to being gentlemen. I think they call it being chivalrous. And yes, I still one hundred and ten percent believe in it.
I relate to this because I was raised by three women, Linda, Glenda, and Melinda, and a girl a couple years older than me. Her name was Ginger. I guess you could say that a smidgen of treating women with chivalry in tow was instilled into my personality at an early age with a keen upbringing of undying politeness, and quite possibly an ass whooping or two. But I have believed ever since I can remember in holding doors open for anyone you’d refer to as Ma’am, Miss, Mrs., Mimi, Mom, or dragon bait.
Because once upon a time, there were young men who raced around the car just to open the door for a girl, if nothing more than to prove to the universe that their mothers had raised them right. There were young men who wouldn’t utter a mean word in the presence of batting eyelashes like butterfly wings. There were even young men who stood up and offered their chair whenever a woman entered a crowded room just because it has always been the right thing to do.
But those days, like my hair, are quickly evaporating into thin air.
I’m not thrilled to say it, but unfortunately the landscape of romance and chivalry has eroded drastically over the last dozen years since the introduction of swiping right past what is in front of you was invented.
Even so, some of us still remember our mother constantly reminding us to treat every girl, every woman, even better than Persephone on her wedding day.
I overheard one of the women that just walked in ask the boy how he became such a knight in unlaundered sweatpants.
“That’s easy,” he said. “It’s because my dad told me that being sweet to girls is a dying art and it’s right thing to do.”
It is from a place of honesty when I tell you that my early childhood was nothing but scented candles, Tupperware parties, Avon magazines, Thursday night women's bowling league. Tee-ball for me on Fridays, Saturday morning cartoons, soft throw blankets, and way too damn many episodes of The Days of Our Lives, lest we forget church on Sundays.
While thinking about to write next, the kid darts toward the door again. He opens it for a woman with hints of silver and marigold locks that shine like embers of moonlight at the stroke of midnight. She glows like Persephone on her wedding day.
I envy the hell out of this kid.
I envy him because I want to be him. Because I sometimes forget what it means to practice chivalry this day and age. I envy him because I was raised to have the softest of hearts, and for some reason my own heart has hardened like a stone over the last few years or so.
And I’m not sure why, so I’m going to give the honest approach a try.
It was the older I got, the more I started doing things every young boy likes to do with the neighborhood heathens. I fished, explored every inch of woods I could, hunted snakes, played little league, stole bubblegum from the corner store, rode bikes until the stars came out, collected baseball cards, comic books, playboy magazines, et cetera.
All the while, I taught myself how to vacuum up the crumbs from the abandonment wound into the void that was built at the core of me after every peanut butter jelly sandwich I ate for lunch, then running wild with the aforementioned heathens until well after dark every night throughout my adolescence.
So over the years of youthful exuberance, after the wound, I thought had cauterized—I cleverly figured out how to fly under the radar of my deep seated pain, by doing the exact same thing my father did, by running away from everything in search of external validity. Which, still to this day, has a way of leading me astray.
But maybe, I'm the one man with the namesake love, that must heal the generational wounds that all the other men on my father’s side have run from. Who knows?
But I do firmly believe women are the answer to all of humanity’s problems . I always have.
I believe the untethered soul of the wild woman holds the key to much better days. Just as much as I believe that Heaven on earth resides in the heart of a woman. And just as much as I believe in universal love.
I believe women are the greatest gift to all of mankind. I believe they deserve a whole lot more credit than what they get, and that’s being taken for granted.
I believe that instead a man, for one, should forever plant poetic seeds in her subconscious, and let them bloom beneath the glow of patient virtues.
I also believe—and I know I’m a little late to the party—they ultimately have the right to decide what’s best for them and their body, without any man’s instruction, and/or, the supreme court’s chauvanistic and constitutionally wrong involvement of such matters. But what do I know?
I know that no matter what their height, weight, eye color, hair-color, dress size, bra size, or even the color of their damn fingernail polish, they are the most precious element in all the universe, and must be handled delicately with our unwavering support. And just as well, with none of our damn business.
And I believe we as men ought to remember to try and consistently demonstrate our appreciation for them as much as possible, and it starts by simply opening a door.
This kid though, you ought to see him right now holding the door with all the might his tiny little arms can afford.
He is young. He’s blissfully unaware of how much good he’s doing, and the difference he’s making by putting such chivalrous energy out into the universe.
And in the end, he’s not just learning how to be a man.
He’s teaching me how to be an honest one again.
But besides all that sweet smidgen of written honesty about the dying art of chivalry. I want to know who and the hell in their right mind thinks the world is a better place with a bunch of women being treated like absolute shit and taken for granted.
Because it sure as hell ain't me. And happy women’s day to all of you.
Til the next time…
Cordially & Politely,
Ryan Love
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