Happy Valentine's Day

Repost From Last Year


Hi folks,

Today is Valentines Day.  A Happy day to you.  Hope you had a loved one that bought you a Valentine, brought you chocolates, or took you out to dinner.

My sweetie and I celebrated on Sunday with a luxurious brunch.  We held hands, exchanged kisses, but exchanged no valentines...or candy (we seniors gotta watch our sugar levels now)  When we were younger we always attended the annual Valentine's Ball at our club on base.  A nice dinner, drinks and dancing, followed by a night of youthful passion...ah youth!  We must now husband our strength for any one of the three!

So now, as I get older, less focused on drinks and dancing and late night passions, my memories of Valentine's Day as a child come flooding back to me.  I remember our teacher supervising our construction of decorative paper bags, to be pinned on the classroom wall, so that our prospective sweethearts could surreptiously drop a Valentine's card into it.  At the end of the school day we would do our best to feign nonchalance as we retrieved our bag of goodwill to take home and count who and how many love us...or like us enough to give a Valentine.

Do kids still do that?  Drop me a note in the comments section and tell me, I'd love to know.  By god, now I am really curious!

I'm older now and it takes a little longer to stoke the embers...but I like to think I'm wiser.  As I think back on Valentine's Day and romance in my life the one strong note that strikes me is the old adage "love at first sight".  I can tell you younger "snappers" that it really does happen.  The first time I saw my wife my heart turned over and I fell madly in love with the woman who is now, 41 years later, as lovely as the first time I saw her. 

She's had a lot of heartache but she's always stood up to the hurt.  At an age when she seeks solace and comfort she's been treated by some with less respect than she deserves.  But she has always taken it like a true heroine.  Most of all, she has always been there for her loved ones and would do and give to them anything that she could.

Imagine a lady that came to this country, without a proficiency in English and facing strange customs, missing her homeland, yet abandoning it all for her family.  She learned to speak English, learn to sew and spent hundreds of hours making clothes for her kids, learned to cook their favorite foods, studied hard and got her GED degree, then went on to secure a degree in Cosmetology after 500 hours of study.

While being a wife and Mom, she also went out and began a career, ran businesses successfully, but always had the time for her kids.  Yes, she walks a little slower these days but she's never too tired or too committed to her own life, to drop everything she's doing and run to the rescue of others.

If you have a Valentine like that, honor her on this day.