Love You -Not

…

May the English, the British, the Americans, the Australians and Canadians, and all other native English speakers please forgive me, but you all LOVE too much.

You LOVE your children and your spouses, your family, and your pets, you LOVE pizza and beer, you LOVE football and basketball, you LOVE the new restaurant around the corner and you LOVE grandma’s old recipes.

For Heaven’s sake, you even LOVE salad dressing!

Boy, that’s a lot of Love!

Where do I come from -literally? (Also an overused word that never makes any sense literally.) I was born and raised right between Austria and Italy, went to school in the South of Germany, got tortured in class with Latin and Old Greek, and was forced to learn French on top of it because the life of a thirteen-year-old teenage girl wasn’t complicated enough already.

I didn’t see any sense in learning English, because everybody on this planet spoke it already. My heart was set on learning more complicated languages. Furthermore, I just knew I would never use English anyway. (Yep, I was always that smart.)

I wanted to see the world and without any money, I had to choose a career that would allow me to travel. ‘Explore the world and get paid for doing so.’ That was my goal and it left me with two choices. I could become a flying waitress (May all Stewards and Stewardesses forgive me, please) but that didn’t sound appealing enough to a flat-chested little girl with soccer calves and sausage fingers. That’s why I decided to become a translator and interpreter. Of course, not for English, since it was way too simple. (Yeah right!)

The universe, however, in its infinite wisdom, made fun of me -again- or decided to teach me a lesson -again- and let me cross paths with the most handsome, witty, wonderful man I had ever seen. Of course, he had to be an American, who only spoke English.

We fell in love and raced through a very short time of dating and an even shorter engagement (or perhaps we are the longest-lasting one-night-stand ever). Before I knew what hit me, I found myself on a flight to Los Angeles, because if you need to learn to swim, you might as well jump into the deep end right away. And that’s how an Austrian girl from a village with a healthy population of 200 ended up in California, a city full of millions of people. If you want a culture shock, that’s the way to do it.

My native language, like many others, uses different words and phrases for the various kinds of LOVE. The word LOVE itself and the phrase I LOVE YOU are pretty much reserved for special occasions and the special someone.

Here in America? Everybody LOVED me! They also LOVED my hair, my freckles, my accent (which was worse back then, even though it’s still pretty sick “Arnie-style” to this day). They LOVED how I walked and talked -and drove me nuts.

It’s not just the All-You-Can-Eat restaurants that didn’t make any sense, it was also the All-You-Can-Love way these Americans had.

Had they not learned the difference between LOVE and LIKE? What was wrong with all these people.

I continued to “like” only, this love thing was on my nerves.

And what was wrong with my husband. Mr. America told me, “I love you,” on the phone, in notes, in the morning and in the evening. Weird! Of course, he loved me and I loved him! Was that in question?

My grandma loved me dearly, however, she hardly said it and when she said it, it (literally) rocked my little world. It felt like the earth shifted, that’s how special it was.

Fast forward forty years later. At the now tender age of sixty, still with freckles and soccer calves, I happen to LOVE everything. I have become an American (literally).

I LOVE chocolate and our dogs, I LOVE good movies and great books, I LOVE watching the birds and LOVE going for walks, I LOVE gluten-free scones and dairy-free coconut yogurt and yes, of course, I LOVE my husband, at least three times a day (not literally, well not three times) but I tell him over and over that I love him because he needs to know it.

All the good people out there need to know I love them~!

What? Yes, people change! Don’t you LOVE it?

Daily writing prompt

What is a word you feel that too many people use?

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