Great Loves From Little Akrons Grow

Speaking of cute meets, that time-honored device of the movies in which a man and a woman meet in some cute way and begin a romance, Ray Prouty of Westlake Village writes of observing what he feels sure is an example.

“My morning commuting route to work used to take me past a large apartment complex near the beach at Venice. Occasionally I noticed a man walking a dog and several blocks away, a woman with her dog. After a while, I often saw them together. Then for a period of several weeks, I saw neither of them. That ended when he was back walking both dogs. More details, I do not know.”

Well, the details are certainly not hard to imagine. Obviously, on one morning when the man and the woman happened to pass each other closely, their dogs either snarled and started to scrap, or exhibited a sexual interest in each other, and somehow their leashes became entangled.

Embarrassment--the cute meet almost always begins with embarrassment; then laughter, then the tentative exchange of information. The next time they meet they are acquaintances; the next time, friends; the next time something is definitely going on.

The consequences of a cute meet may be brief or drawn-out; but they are inevitable. In this case, obviously, the two decided to get married, and parked their dogs at the vet’s while they went on a honeymoon. On their return they moved into the woman’s apartment, since she felt more at home there. Like all modern couples, they worked out a division of household chores. Evidently it fell to the man to walk the dogs while the wife stayed home and tended to the cooking.

There are no statistics to show that a marriage resulting from a cute meet is more likely than any other to last. I have an idea this one won’t. The man will get tired of walking both dogs. He will suggest getting rid of his wife’s dog, which will force her to decide between them--her husband or her dog? It isn’t hard to see what she will decide.

Meanwhile, you may recall that recently I imagined a similar scenario for a female jewel thief and an American business executive who met cute when she was locked out on the balcony of her apartment on the Costa del Sol, Spain, and he rescued her. (She was trying to get into the apartment next door in search of jewels.)

I speculated that the young man was from Akron, Ohio, a fact that seemed to dismay the young woman; but I pointed out that he was CEO of an Akron rubber corporation and had homes in Malibu and Monaco and an apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York City, as well as in Akron.

A reader who comes from Akron took me to task for this imagined slur on her former hometown. She said Akron had many advantages over Los Angeles. She wanted to know why I didn’t say he lived in Bakersfield.

I’m not sure why I chose Akron. I’ve never been there. I seemed so Midwestern, like Zenith in Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbitt.” Perhaps in the back of my mind was the recollection that Katharine Hepburn, as the passionate spinster in “Summertime” was also on a vacation from Akron when she met Rossano Brazzi in Venice and went spinning into their affair.

Somehow her being from Akron suggested everything dull, uneventful and colorless about life in middle America, as contrasted with the dizzying excitement and romance of Venice.

As for my daring to imply that Bakersfield is boring and unromantic, I could hardly do that. I had already observed that to me Bakersfield would always seem the most romantic city in the world, since that’s where I met my wife.

I find in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that Akron has several lakes and golf courses and 4,300 acres of parks. Besides being the rubber capital of the world, it also produces farm machinery, aluminum siding, house fittings, electrical and transportation equipment, plastics, fishing tackle, children’s books and toys, and chemicals.

It’s probably just as fertile a ground for the cute meet as Los Angeles, or the Costa del Sol; also, I doubt that you can buy crack on every street corner or that there’s a gang shooting every day; and it’s only 45 minutes from Cleveland.