The Milan News-Leader
A Heritage Newspaper
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Author shows romance not confined to the young
By Brian Cox, Staff Writer
PUBLISHED: February 14, 2008
At the heart of Valentine's Day is romance.
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What then could be a more perfect Valentine's Day book than a true love story that spans more than four decades?
A story of love lost, love found, and then lost again? A tale of idyllic young love and of redemptive mature love?
In his memoir "The Gift of Ruth" (River Pointe Publications, 215 pp), local author Jay Carp writes a moving love story about his wife Ruth, to whom he was engaged in 1950 but didn't end up marrying until more than 40 years later.
Carp tells the story with raw and frank honesty, revealing that romance is not confined to only the young.
He tells of falling in love with Ruth in 1948 and becoming engaged two years later while still in school.
"Ruth was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen," he writes. "She was tall, over 5 feet 10 inches, and she carried herself gracefully. She had long blond hair, green eyes and a face that could make angels sing."
Upon their graduation, however, the relationship withers under the strains and demands of post-collegiate life and the two young lovers find themselves traveling down diverging paths.
"Our relationship faltered and failed slowly from the time we graduated in June until early the following summer," writes Carp.
After they break off their engagement, Carp eventually marries another woman, has children and moves to Massachusetts. Ruth, too, marries and starts a family.
The romance faded into the past and the two lost touch with one another.
Some 40 years later, Carp was traveling across country from Massachusetts to California after the sudden death of his wife, Virginia. He arranged to make a brief weekend stop in Ann Arbor to see Ruth and her ailing mother.
He expected a calm weekend of catching up with an old flame. He certainly did not expect to find love again.
But over the course of that weekend, Carp and Ruth, both now in their 60s, found the love of their youth rekindled, and Carp's plans to move to California abruptly changed.
Six months later, they were married. It was true love.
Sadly, it was not to last long. Three years after they married, Ruth was diagnosed with breast cancer that eventually spread to her liver. She died a year later at the age of 68.
While the tragedy of Ruth's death and Carp's grief over shadow the book, its central theme is the abiding power of love.
"There is a mysterious force, almost like the pull of a magnetic field, which draws true lovers together," Carp writes. "It cannot be defined, or measured, or photographed, but it's there. It radiates from the bodies and the souls of the man and woman intertwined with each other. Together, they generate their own private force field. For those fortunate enough to savor this kind of love, it's the most wondrous emotion in the world."
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