the sweetness of you

(You used to hear the term "status quo" (the way things are -- the current state of affairs). I never hear it anymore. ..."Let's keep it status quo"...like that.)

----------- Thinking about relationships and Love, I remembered things I had read about John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie.
When they got married in 1953, he had already served as a congressman, & been elected to the Senate in 1952. The Plan was in Motion to get him elected president, so Jacqueline Bouvier, 12 years younger than JFK, entered a Career Situation that was already very much up-and-running.

She was "home alone" a lot, because he campaigned (and "senator-ed") much of the time. "We had absolutely no home life," she said later.

Once at a luncheon where Sen. & Mrs. Kennedy were together, JFK said to a colleague, to tease his wife for her shyness about campaigning, "Senator such-and-such, Mrs. Kennedy is superb in her personal life; do you think she will ever amount to anything in her public life?"
And Jackie smoothly and immediately asked the guy, "Senator, Jack is superb in his public life; do you think that he will ever amount to anything in his personal life?"

As he entered the presidency in 1961, JFK and his advisors monitored press coverage and curiosity about Mrs. Kennedy -- there was concern that her "rarefied" tastes -- intellectual, exotic -- (some people call it "arty") might alienate some voters ...and the new president was heard to joke, "She's got too much status and not enough quo"...

I read that when Jackie was reading a book, if JFK thought it looked interesting he would "snatch it up" when she laid it down, & read it himself.

They both enjoyed reading and discussing
history, and poetry,
and they "competed" at memorizing each other's favorite poems.

---------------------------
To the modern listener, that can sound kind of -- different.
Competing? At memorizing poems? All right, then...
"I memorized your favorite poem" -- and then -- recite it aloud.
And the other person answers, "Hey, I memorized two of your favorite poems!"
(Take that!)
Quaint. That's the word I wanted.

Memorizing the other person's favorite poems is actually a pretty cool way to express love, and value of the person.
It says,
"You like it? Then I honor it!"

Some people might scoff and say, "Hey, those were wealthy, privileged people who could take time to sit around memorizing freakin' poetry."
But really, the truth is a person doesn't have to be rich or have a B.A. from Harvard to do cool things like that. If we want to do them, we can do them.

You do not have to be rich to be classy.

-30-