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.

A VALENTINE FROM THEORY CORNER

INT. GRANDPA UNCLE EDDIE"S HOUSE: 

GRANDSON: "Tell us again how you met Grandma."

GRANDPA: "Aw, I must have told you that story five times at least. Don't you want to hear something else?"

GRANDKIDS (ALL): "No! No! We wanna' hear about Grandma. Pleasepleasepleaseplease!"

GRANDPA: "Ooookay. Okay. Weeell, it was at a little park by the sea..."

GRANDDAD: "I wasn't looking where I was going and we just bumped into each other. I tried to apologize but I found I couldn't speak. My lips refused to move. Infront of me was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen and all I could do was look. 

She must have felt something for me too because for the longest time we just stared and stared at each other's eyes, our faces slowly inching closer and closer."

GRANDAD: "Then, when we could stand it no longer, we threw open our arms and clung to each other, clung as if our lives depended on it!"

GRANDPA: "I guess we weren't paying attention to what was going on around us. The biggest thunderstorm you ever saw was starting overhead."

GRANDPA: "The rain came down in torrents."

GRANDSON: "(GASP!) Did you get wet?"

GRANDPA: "Oh, yeah...soaked to the gills...but we didn't care."

GRANDPA: "Holding Grandma was like..."

GRANDPA: "...it was like...diving into a burning volcano."

GRANDPA: 'It was a kind of insanity."

GRANDPA: "Well, I'll never be able to find the right words."

GRANDPA: "Anyway the storm got worse and worse."

GRANDPA: "By the time we realized what had happened it was too late."

GRANDPA: "We were swept out to sea, a mile from the shore."

GRANDCHILDREN: "Woooooww!!!!"

GRANDPA: "But that wasn't all. We soon discovered that we weren't alone."

GRANDPA: "From out of nowhere a big old shark came up and swallowed your grandma!"

GRANDDAUGHTER: "Did you karate chop him?"

GRANDPA: "Huh?...karate chop? Er, oh yeah, sure...but it didn't do any good. It was a tough situation. With her sitting there in all those digestive juices, I knew Grandma had only minutes to live."

GRANDPA: "Fortunately I always carried a spear and flippers."

GRANDMA: "Kids, it's time to go to bed. Grandpa can finish the story in the morning."

KIDS (ALL): "Awwwwwwwwww!!!"

WHAT WOULD TRULY ROMANTIC VALENTINES LOOK LIKE?

You know, it's funny....modern girls all think they're above this sort of thing....but they're not. The models in the picture may look plastic, the writing may come off as insincere or cliched, but the card is effective nevertheless.

People respond to elevated speech, to words that conjure up a romantic ideal. It doesn't matter that people don't talk that way in real life. That's precisely why we like it.

Romance is too important to be spoken about in the same language that we use to buy aspirin.

Johnny Depp (above) demonstrates how to seduce with with words alone.

For the curmudgeons out there, here's (above) some valentine vitriol.