the infinite romance of languages you don't speak

This one goes out to my beautiful & patient wife, sitting halfway across the world in wintry Chicago tending to our puppy's irritable digestive tract and enduring the mess I left behind in our apartment. She deals with my perpetual absences with a supportive smile, which is no small feat considering how much time and energy my job demands, and how it colors everything about our life together. I guess that's love for you, an amazing, wondrous phenomenon, that renders even unacceptable absences palatable. An old friend once told me, in a fit of uncharacteristic clarity, that "love is when the sacrifices aren't sacrifices, they're just negligible details." I still mull over that statement occasionlly, but it makes more and more sense as I see it play out in my relationship. So here's a song for my wife, by Brazilian chanteuse Ivete Sangalo, called "Quando a Chuva Passar."

This is the song my wife and I used for our first dance at our wedding...We stood in front of all our befuddled friends and family and swayed softly as this song played in the background. We don't speak Portuguese, and not a soul there actually understood the lyrics, but the moment was still infused with meaning, drenched with potency. Sometimes the languages we don't speak offer us ways to express sentiments that our everyday words can't convey. That's how I feel about this track, and about my wife... Ivete sings it well, and the crowd echoes her with utter devotion: "Eu sou seu e fim, e o meu amor é imensidão..."