romance

When we're studying personal narratives in my class, we do an exercise that is meant to help them work on description and practice the all-important "show, don't tell." I put them into groups and give them several sentences, one at a time, like "The tree is tall" and "He is angry." For each sentence, they are supposed to add adjectives, imagery, dialogue, or whatever they can to make the sentence more interesting.
One of the sentences I always give them is "They are in love," and I ask them specifically to use dialogue to illustrate as much. They're ninth graders, so this shouldn't be a surprise, but let me tell you - they always get it wrong.
There is lots of talk of sunsets, diamonds, beauty, and the moon. Lots of talk of dramatic on-the-knee proposals and long walks on tropical beaches. Cliches abound. I always chuckle a little, not because I think I know love better than they (because I don't, but that's a topic for another day), but because I've always been one of those people who is a little grossed out by the popular notion of romance. Anything with even a slight degree of sap makes me itchy, and grand professions of love more often than not strike me as insincere and too easy. I do, truly, believe that it's the little everyday events and the deceptively simple statements that are the greatest expressions of love and therefore the most romantic.
My freshman year of college, my roommates and I had a piece of paper hanging on our wall on which we would write lines from songs that struck us as particularly romantic. One of my favorites was Joni Mitchell's "I could drink a case of you" (or really all the lyrics to that song). Maybe it's the subtlety that I like because it's the opposite of much, or maybe it's just that I'm an English teacher and I appreciate especially clever manipulations of language.
I thought of this all because in the past few days I have heard Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers' "Here Comes my Girl" so many times and each time and thought, "Yes!"
It's just that simple and perfect.