The Greatest Love Story Ever Told: Brace Yourselves

This print hangs over my bed.  It depicts the greatest love story ever told.  Brace yourselves.  You may find yourselves unable to handle it.  You have probably never heard anything like it before.

Provenance:  the print was discovered in a cardboard box in my parents’ basement where it must have been for thirty years.  There was no water or mold damage to it in spite of the fact that the basement was prone to flooding at least once per decade.  Later we found an early sixties Polaroid of the type with the scalloped corner showing this print on the wall above my grandparents’ davenport, my father and a couple cousins parked below it.

It struck me as a kind of campy, Boys’ Life, wholesome precursor to the genre of Thomas Kincaid, painter-of-the-light-he-thinks-shines-out-of-his-asshole, so I figured I’d hang it on a blank spot on a wall in my kid’s room.    Before I got around to it, though, I grew tired of the blank spot in my own room and made do.  I had no idea at the time that I had infused my nest with the greatest love story ever told.

The story:  there is a man sitting by a fire before his tent, in the wilderness, under a full moon.  He is thinking about a woman.  He loves her and he misses her, but he has a good reason for being exactly where he is, and he trusts her, and they will be together again soon.  The woman is somewhere in a house getting ready for bed.  She is not looking out the window at the same full moon because that would be too cheesy, even for me.  She loves the man and she misses him, but she trusts him and knows he has a good reason for being exactly where he is, as does she, and that they will be together again soon.  That is all.

There is an alternate ending in which the woman is actually asleep in the tent with the man’s thumbprints all over her thighs.