Marjorie and Ed: A Love Story by Edward L. Osler
What's It About?
Love stories can be like fairy tales, too glossy and sweet to be true, so sometimes grownups quit believing in them.The love story of Edward Lee Osler and his beloved Marjorie, however, is honest in its portrayal of all the challenges that mature lovers face. That the two of them persevere inspires Osler’s readers to believe in love. Their story is endearingly imperfect and charming from the very beginning.
Their first date must be postponed because Ed fell out of bed. Well, “slid” out of bed, actually. A determined romantic, he had bought himself red satin sheets for his 60th birthday. In a sweet, ingenuous letter to Marjorie, he asks for a rain check, admitting his folly.
Graciously, Marjorie accepts. “It is raining here!” she tells him.
The chemistry is obvious when she walks into the restaurant for their first date, but Ed is not surprised. He believes in fate, and he believes in love.
TRUE LOVE COMBINED WITH REAL DIFFICULTIES
The book is a collection of Ed’s emails to Marjorie linked together with poetry he had written and sent to her during their courtship. We see Marjorie through Ed’s eyes and through his words. Meanwhile, she’s a woman of few words, but his are enough. “I feel the same way,” she writes back in one of her very few and very brief messages back. “I love you very much.”
Ed comes to Marjorie eight years after a divorce and Marjorie is a widow. The two of them enter into a relationship, lugging their respective baggage, whether it is emotional, financial or physical. Ed’s health and moods need monitoring. Finances must be sorted out. They need to move in together. So much has to be handled when lovers are neither young nor foolish.
Marjorie and Ed: A Love Story is an inspiration for readers both young and old; love can happen at any age. “I’ve waited 60 years to meet you,” he writes to Marjorie, and “without trying, we have established the ‘perfect’ relationship.”
Osler ends his collection with several additional pages of poetry and an epilogue that is bittersweet.
“I sometimes do not know,” he wrote in a poem to her, “The words to say to you.” Clearly, he does. He wrote an entire book of the right words to say to Marjorie.
