Afterglow

Last Valentine’s Day this youngish dude showed up beside me at the supermarket register and slapped down six wilted dyed-blue daisies. He saw me look at them. “Hey, it’s the THOUGHT that counts!” he said, going for that most classic of Nice-Try maneuvers.Lost in memory, I held my tongue, because back when David and  I were first married, we marked our special days the right way, with flowers and candy and little dinners out. Love was in the air!  Later, when babies came, dinners out turned into Shake ‘n Bake chicken on the saggy back balcony of our saggy old apartment and that’s when we began having “issues,” over such questions as, “Can it really be called ‘minding the baby’ if you’re watching the ball game AND reading the paper at the same time, as the infant sits ignored beside you, ingesting soggy fistfuls  of the Sunday supplement?”With little ones around of course, we couldn’t really AIR these issues - except on joint vacations with other couples when we’d go off on what I came to call our “Fight Walks. “You should ask yourself if this FEMINISM stuff is really making you happy,” old Dave said to me on one such walk. And again I held my tongue, merely employing my special telekinetic girl Voodoo powers to stick mental pins in all his underpants.He got his revenge though: That year he gave me a can of 3-in-1 Motor Oil for Valentine’s Day. The next it was a book of Chinese love poems, still in Chinese. I meanwhile gave him boxes of fudge, small potted plants, dozens of stuffed animals because hey who doesn’t love a stuffed animal? But “You know,” I said one year, “you have never once in all our time together told me that you love me! So I think maybe you - (sob) - don’t!”“Don’t be ridiculous,” came his icy retort. “I wouldn’t have had CHILDREN with you if I didn’t love you,” a sentences I found to be so bleak and barren I embroidered it and hung it in the kitchen, right above my Cinderella mop.But all that was long ago, when I was first married to this odd fellow. More recently I was attempting to do therapy over the phone with an awesome Jungian psychologist when he said out of the blue one day, “I don’t get this therapy stuff. Why don’t you just DECIDE TO FEEL DIFFERENT?”My eyes widened and widened– and this time I couldn’t keep silent. “Are you kidding me? As if YOU’RE not an absolute Child’s GARDEN of Messed-up-ness!”We both laughed then, because lately... well we just seem to have called a truce. Anyway, last year he bought me a big fancy Valentine he was very careful not to sign in any way, which I found hilarious. And for his present this year I bought us a matched pair of travel mugs we can take on our Fight Walks, which, believe it or not, we no longer even fight on.So love is a minefield, yes it is but still all these years later I have to say: it's also one dandy source of humor!