9 October—Hobbling home from the post office the other day, just past the Noyes Memorial Building (a.k.a. the Litchfield Historical Society) on East Street, I was rather taken aback by a couple on the sidewalk in flagrante delicto. Indulging in sexual intercourse, brazenly copulating in public. They obviously didn’t care who saw them humping, screwing, getting it on, schtupping. And, of course, fucking. Our friends across the pond call it rumpy-pumpy. It was East Street, so what the hell, you say. But was the audacious couple making love?

That got me to thinking about the word “love.” What does making love really mean? Does love at first sight actually have anything to do with love? Or is love merely a euphemism?

Consider the concept of love. But first let’s get the tennis expression out of the way. In that sport’s scoring, love means nil, nought, bupkes. Or zero. A zero is an oval. Goose egg. Or just plain egg-shaped. The French for “the egg” is “l’oeuf.” Brits mispronounce all languages (including American English), so they made l’oeuf into love. Easy as that.

Leaving tennis, then, love, simply defined, is a state of feeling that manifests itself in solicitude, delight, affection, and other nice, desirable things. So can a person actually love a perfect stranger? Or is love at first sight simply and more accurately lust at first sight? Isn’t the spark between two people really lust rather than love?

If you’re lucky, physical attraction—lust—will lead to love. Familiarity certainly can breed contempt, but it can also breed love.

And the very expression “making love” is totally ridiculous, even ludicrous, a brilliant euphemism if ever there was one. The act of copulation is purely physical and neurological, after all. It feels good. That’s why all animals strive to copulate; they don’t consider that they’re procreating in order to propagate their species and they probably don’t know anything about love. If actual love is involved (in whatever species), it’s only because anything and everything feels better when you do it with someone you love. But it’s an indisputable fact that in the real world love isn’t a requirement for sexual intercourse among Homines sapientes, even religious ones.

And I’m not going to quote Cole Porter’s “Let’s Fall in Love.”

Incidentally, the couple copulating on the East Street sidewalk were bumblebees. Evidently they didn’t want to do their rumpy-pumpy in front of their friends in the hive . . .