A VALENTINE ESSAY: "HOW I MET MY WIFE"

My computer room is in disarray so I can't shoot the fresh visuals I'd need to illustrate this story. Instead I'll borrow some pictures of myself from previous blogs and hope for the best. Here goes....

Having acknowledged, at a very early age, the indispensability of women, I had to find the answer to only one question: which one?

The girl I found was a hormone driven boy's dream come true, but she was also given to outbursts of sentimentality. She's still that way today. She's a buddy. Women bore her. She insists on buying her round, but she secretly hopes that doors will be opened for her because she's really a quivering jelly of feminine sensitivity.

She writes mystery stories which I'm not allowed to read. She used to paint, but the possibilities of two dimensions have been exhausted, and, besides, the brushes are stiff with neglect. She subscribes to a literary magazine but doesn't always read it because of the demands of her career, of being a mother, and of being a righter of her husband's wrongs.

She crawls from room to room, gratefully whimpering when she finds masculine disorder and piteously hurt by any indications of masculine independence.  She is what writer Patrick Catling described as a "sweetly scented pink octopus of maternal solicitude."

She keeps looking up from her Sudoku (above) to smile. She wields a thermometer like a magic wand.

She's a terrible weight pressing hotly on the shoulders,  a hobble, a blindfold, a distracting sound, a thick wad of fly-paper in the Kleenex box. But she is necessary.

The tests have been numerous, but the final outcome had already been decided long ago when we were both councilors at the same Summer camp.

In the dark, in a rowboat beached under a sheltering cave of pine needles, in spite of awful fear, I first kissed Woman. Though it was an inaccurate kiss, just a touch of the lips, it was a kiss of total commitment. I hadn't yet come across Yeats' advice: "Never give all the heart." I intuitively spurned the advice then and gave all the heart there was, and I give it still.

BTW: This is a much altered version of a tome by children's author, Patrick Skene Catling.