I am a card-holding, hopeless romantic. I've pressed hearts into sandwich bread, squirted letters with perfume, and made a Valentine's message candy board. These are the G-rated things. No, not G-strings. Although, considering this next story, I can see where you could get your point across by wrapping a fried bologna and egg sandwich in a thong. But...thank GAWD! I didn't do that on this day. What I did was bad enough:
Well, Valentine's Day rolled around one year and I packed a few sandwiches for Don's lunch. I wrote an elicit love letter and wrapped it in heavy foil so the Duke's mayo wouldn't bleed the ink, then planted it smack dab in the middle of his Curtis bologna sandwich.
Lunchtime came and went. Not a word, no call... nothing. I concluded that he must have had a busy day. That evening, I unpacked Don's empty lunch box and asked him coyly, "Did you like that sandwich?" Without blinking he tells me he traded with Mike who "liked it immensely." I can't even describe my embarrassment. Don promised after seeing how mortified I was that the guy didn't read the letter. I wasn't convinced and prayed for weeks that he would find new and better employment.
This week, after being bombarded with adds for Pajama Jammies and the huge Vermont Valentine's Teddy bear and darn near tripping over a two-foot card at CVS, I decided to look at Valentine's a different way—through the eyes of the old. Ask a widower of many years and they will tell you: it is never old enough. A friend of mine lost her grandmother. Her grandmother and grandfather had been married 70 odd years. At the funeral her grandfather said the same, "It just wasn't long enough."
I remembered an experience of my own. I was driving through our neighborhood on a clear fall day. I saw a gentleman in his upper 80s trimming his bushes in front of his house with his electric or gas hedge trimmer. I had to stop the car and turn around to make sure my eyes hadn't deceived me. Chopped leaves whizzed through the air as the man and his boy toy gleefully chopped away at his shrubs. A walker stood alone in front of him as he held on to his power tool with both arms. Behind him, his wife in her housecoat holding him tightly from behind.
I will be anonymous here, but will tell you that my little experiment in old love has warmed me and humbled me immensely this week. Ask an 88-year-old who has been left alone when her spouse died eight years earlier. Ask them about love. Ask how they met. Hallmark wishes it could catch the expression of joy in their face as they gently caress a photograph while telling you about that dance when they met. The funny thing he said to her and finally the day they left them alone. Old love is good. Old chocolate, not so much.
