Love is the most common form of lunacy that the human race has come up with yet.
Of course, with Valentine’s Day this Friday, I am primarily focusing on the idea of romantic love — that wacky jigsaw puzzle of broken hearts and locked lips, of passionate embraces and crazy leaps of faith. And stupidity.
There are some pieces to that puzzle that you never would have figured would have possibly fit together, but does that stop the clumsy, invisible hands of the Mad Matchmaker from slamming the pieces together until they’re stuck awkwardly, bellowing gleefully, “Ha! I told you that”s where they went!”
Of course not.
And maybe that’s not altogether a bad thing.
Whether it’s a bare-cheeked cherub slinging arrows or a kindly, gray-bearded father peeping down quizzically from the heavens that is responsible for the earthquakes of love and the volcanoes of passion, sometimes love gets it right.
Take, for example, my parents. Between the two of them, they created one of the happiest, most stable and loving homes that can possibly be found in the 21st century.
Before they were Mom and Dad to me, they were Jack Kerns and Jean McAmis. Neither knew that the other even existed.
They were just two wild and crazy kids who were partying through their 20s in Myrtle Beach, S.C., way back when Myrtle Beach was cool.
Mom and Dad tell a lot of stories about those days — censoring, I’m sure, any past transgressions that they’d rather not divulge to their daughters.
But in my mind, I can see how it all went down.
Jean blew the proverbial popsicle stand that is ETSU with her best friend, Jean Dessart, careening south down the highway in a used mail truck that lacked front seats.
They patched that up with a couple of lawn chairs, which would later double as beach chairs when they dropped anchor on the South Carolina shore.
Jean Marie and her best bud Jean Claire lived out of a truck and an old tent until they scraped together enough money for a real apartment.
Jean and Jean worked crappy seafood houses. They scoured the beaches, taking pictures of sun-blistered tourists and selling them the pictures at the end of the day. They drank. They hung out with cute photographers. They laughed till they cried.
Meanwhile, Jack was ditching the wind and snow of Ohio in search of greener grass.
He went to Clemson State for a degree in turfgrass management.
He roamed the new territory, soaking up the sun and working long days on a nearby golf course, cooling his sunburn at night with beer, loud music, and obnoxious friends that passed out on his couch, which, knowing Dad, was probably his only furniture.
He just happened to move into the apartment across from the Tennessee blonde.
I wonder how many arrows Cupid had to hurl before they realized, “Hey, hot damn, I’m in love.”
I’ve done stupid things for what I have thought to be love.
I once moved thousands of miles away from my beloved friends and family, just to be with a guy that, by the end of the relationship, I knew could never be honestly called a man.
I went Bigfoot hunting with a boyfriend in high school who was convinced that the missing link was slouching around the hills of Southeastern Ohio.
I dated an Elvis impersonator, even combed record stores for Elvis memorabilia despite the fact that I dislike the King intensely.
One of my friends recently ended up going to jail because of a series of redneck brawls in which she assaulted the new girlfriend of her ex-lover.
Sheesh.
What was the point besides being highly entertaining on the town gossip circuit?
Love has a way of making people slap their foreheads and mumble, “What the hell was I thinking?”
My boyfriend Dale and I are nearing our two year anniversary, which I told him I hoped would be a landmark, and not a land mine.
I want to believe that I am in love and this time, that it’s real, even if this is all it will ever be.
You can’t hold up love at gunpoint.
You can’t brandish a piece at Cupid, and demand, “Love me, or else.”
It just doesn’t work that way.
So in my mind, when I try to sort out that maddening Rubix cube of love, I think back to the stories of the blonde from Tennessee talking to the skinny goofball with the ‘fro from Ohio, on that very first night.
I wonder if he thought her accent was cute.
I wonder if he made her laugh.
I wonder if I’ll ever know what they somehow did, even way back then.

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