#10 Reacquainted With Love

Firstly, it must be said that I greatly enjoyed reading these two texts. My most significant Aha! Moment came from reading Charles W. Chestnutt’s “The Wife of his Youth”. In reading the first section of the short story, I became deeply invested in Mr. Ryder’s aspirations of proposing to Ms. Dixon. I rejoiced in the fact that he set out to organize a ball in honor of the lady he had fallen in love with. This earned Mr. Ryder several points in my book. I fell even more in love with his character as he looked to the poet Tennyson for written expression of his feelings for the lovely sounding Ms. Dixon. The way in which Tennyson describes Queen Guinevere is heartwarming. The lines which read, “A man had given all other bliss/And all his worldly worth for this,/To waste his whole heart in one kiss/Upon her perfect lips", resembled the way in which I feel for my very own boyfriend, to whom I aspire to marry one day very soon. I feel like he is a secret treasure shared with me from God and that I have been entrusted with his very tender and loving heart. At this notion, I so deeply wished to read on and make sure that Mr. Ryder’s proposition for marriage was accepted and to read the undoubtedly poetic way in which he would express his delightfulness in having his love reciprocated. With this in mind, one can see how I was taken a back at the introduction of his elderly female visitor and her distraction from the love story that I had expected to take place. As she began to tell Mr. Ryder her story, an idea ran past my mind, for an extremely brief moment, that he could in fact be the man she’d been tirelessly searching for. However, I quickly dismissed the thought by saying to myself that Mr. Ryder and his whole heart belonged to Ms. Dixon, and that surely they were to be together. This old woman seemed, in my mind, incapable of ever holding the attention and affection of the refined, scholarly, and debonair Mr. Ryder. Ms. Dixon was the only woman capable of doing such a thing, she was his perfect female counterpart.   Once Mr. Ryder began to explain the old woman’s testimony to the party guest, I thought he chose her story rather than the Tennyson poetry to Segway into his proposal to Ms. Dixon. I began to question this idea once he used the old “my friend has a problem “ example when he said that a friend of his came to him with asking for advice. Everyone knows that when they have a problem that they are embarrassed claim as their own, they use the example of knowing a friend who has said problem. As I read that the old woman was indeed “ the wife of his youth” I was admittedly a tiny bit sad for his future with Ms. Dixon, but at the same time rejoiceful for the elderly woman who could at last end her search for the man who’d captured her hearts affection so many years ago.