Happy Valentine's Day

Tonight’s theme is “Glitter in the Air” by Pink. One of my favorite songs.



Valentine’s Day is on February 14th, a memorial to St. Valentine, caught and killed for secretly marrying couples in Ancient Rome. Emperor Claudius II was having a difficult time filling his armies, and felt that the men didn’t want to leave their wives and families, so he instituted a law prohibiting marriage. St. Valentine wed couples in secret and for it, he was killed.

I spoke with my Gram today. I made a small purse for her, about hand sized, with a small zipper and silken lining. It’s always difficult to sew something for a master seamstress. She approved of my seams, and proper structure. (this by the way was a point of baited breath for the 3 days it took to arrive there *rubs fingers finally uncrossed in three days*) The purse reminded her of when she and my Grandfather went out on their first date as she carried a small purse almost exaclty like it. They had gone up to Sansui Park and he took her on the rollercoaster. She screamed the entire time, nonstop start to finish then sobbed rather violently into his chest when she was finally off. She was 18. She has never enjoyed a roller coaster, not then nor since, but something about the moment she realized that she was crying into the chest of this man she didn’t know very well, her breath caught in her chest. She looked up into his blue gray eyes and he looked earnestly sorry, concerned and guilty. That single look was it. That’s all she needed to know about him, right there. He was 25 at the time. She made him promise to never take her on another one of those awful things again as long as they lived. He smiled, took his hat off, held it to his chest and swore to her that he would never in all his life ask her to go on another roller coaster. He never did either, and they were married for 50 years.

The small purse brought this memory back to her as if it were yesterday. She’ll be 91 in March. He’s been gone now for 23 years. He was 6’7”, with wavy dark brown hair, and to his death stronger than a bull, in the very literal farm sense of the word. My Gram is 5’6” with sapphire eyes, she was one of the first Max Factor Girls with auburn hair and the red streaks within her hair mark the passions that run in her veins. The woman is 90, and has legs more muscled than most 20 year olds. She walks 5 miles a day because if she doesn’t, she has too much energy to sleep at a decent hour. She lives alone in the family house where she was born. The farm as it was is now only alive in memories. Now it is just rolling land dotted by flowers, and small markers of family pets that have joined with the earth. The last remaining building is the house itself. The rest were sold off and moved piece by piece, or moved to family farms board by board and reconstructed. When she looks out the front door into the field as the sun rises she can swear she still sees him checking the fence line on the pasture as he walked to the barn.

I can still hear her call for him when something had gone awry, usually one of us, in some form of breakage, we were forever breaking some part or another as we were kids. “RAYmond!” was the call, and as if like magic, no matter the time of day, he simply appeared out of thin air to solve whatever problem, issue or broken child lay before him. A loose bull running through the horse pasture bucking and kicking would find him walking calmly toward it, grabbing it by the horn and dragging it back to its own field as if it were nothing more than wayward pup being carried off by its mother. A loose turkey trying to fight with the dog would be scooped from the side so deftly the poor jake never knew how it was exactly it returned to its own pen, but somewhat flustered it would go and scratch in the back flinging pebbles to and fro as it showed its displeasure. Smiling my Grandfather would simply head back across the road to the railroad where he worked as if his few minutes away were spent having a cup of coffee. My Gram was always standing on the porch, her hands wringing against her chest as her Superman came and dealt with the issue, nonplussed and grinning, then departed always with a tip of his hat and a wink. If you’ve ever seen a woman swoon, she did so, every single time.

She never married again, she couldn’t, as she said so many times when men tried to “court her” in many ways over many years, “What other man could possibly compare?” She shared her memories of him, before he was a father, before he was a grandfather, but when he was just a man, and a husband. I could hear her smiling over the phone as she related the sweet stories of how they fell in love. He was sure she would never fall for a zoot suit wearing ladies man seven years her senior. She was sure he wouldn’t want a “modern working woman with a mind of her own”. They were both wrong.

When they would go out to dance on Friday nights up at the club he would tell her “Go dance with (insert name here) he looks so sad, and dancing with you would put a smile on any man’s face.” And she would, and it did indeed make the fellow smile. My grandfather would allow one dance and then return to wisk her away again. They went out every Friday night. That was their night, to be a couple, and nothing else for a few hours. Even when she was pregnant, and felt much too large for dancing he would tell her, “It’s good for the baby.” So she’d go. I can remember as a kid sneaking up to the club, the entire lot of us (it was only up the hill past the last pasture) and peeking in the window to watch them dance together. The were always so happy, even in the hardest of times, it let them forget, or maybe reminded them that times were hard before and they made it through. They were in perfect unison as they moved so fluidly around the dance floor. Each movement so perfectly timed as they spun around and around. They moved as a singular unit rather than two people. It was beautiful. We always got caught peeking in the window, I actually can’t think of a single time we didn’t. It’s not easy for 8 kids to all look in a single window at the same time. It was the only window we were all tall enough to see into. Each time the jig was up they’d call out to my grandparents and point at the window. We’d wave and point back toward the house and my Grandfather would give his stern look and we’d all run like chickens back toward the house. All these years I thought they had come out to make sure we all went home. I found out today they never even bothered once since they knew that the singular look was enough to send us all running right back home.

The love they had was epic. It was the love of a lifetime, the love that extends beyond lifetimes. To each and every one of you that reads this, I wish you all the same love in your lives. Happy Valentine’s Day, and may your heart be truly content.