Several years ago, I wrote a smart-ass Valentine’s Day piece. In summary, it was social commentary regarding the pointless nature of an imaginary holiday that the naive among us laud and the jaded among us disdain for the same reason:
It’s romantic.
Don’t get me wrong; romance is nice as a gesture, whether receiving or giving. There’s nothing at all wrong with setting aside a day out of the year for the sole purpose of proclaiming your love for another. It’s nice. Forget about the fact that there are anniversaries, birthdays, and celebrations of special occasions that have meaning only to you and that other person you so deeply love.
Here’s the problem with romance: the notion itself tends to misguide us. We tend to think of it in terms of doing things to make whatever we’re commemorating special.
Romantic dinners out. Romantic dinners in. Romantic weekend get-aways. Romantic extended vacations.
To the point, these things don’t really represent love, which is the very thing Valentine’s Day purports to celebrate. They represent instead celebrations, which are in the slender minority of our day-to-day. As an example, here’s how I spent my Valentine’s Day.
To begin with, last Tuesday, my wife came home sick after being indirectly exposed to COVID-19 a few days before. Her symptoms? Persistent cough with deep chest congestion, as well as feeling tired and run down with body aches and pains. As you might expect, two days later, I woke up with a persistent cough with deep chest congestion and was feeling tired and run down. Friday, things did not improve for either of us so Saturday I arranged to be tested for COVID, hoping beyond hope that we would not have to deal with the weight of managing our body’s response to the disease, while also rearranging our social calendar such as
For the first time in a year, Heidi and I were invited to watch the grandkids, a casualty of the pandemic. Canceled.
I had an invitation to tour a cigar lounge where they rolled their own premium cigars on premise with a long time friend and a new acquaintance who had taken an interest in our own new-found hobby. Canceled.
Lunch with the guys. Canceled.
Fast forward to Sunday morning, Heidi appeared to be on her deathbed and my COVID test results had not surfaced—meanwhile my sister-in-law, who lives with us, also became ill. All of this as our region faced the prospect of the worst cold front in 30 years.
In an attempt to normalize things—at least for me—I orchestrated morning coffee with my wife. I watched as she mindlessly tuned into a reality TV show about people building dream homes for ordinary folks and periodically expressed her misery with muffled groans.
Fearing the worst, I finally called the clinic that tested me and made an appointment for her. 45 minutes later, a doctor called her and asked about her symptoms. After quizzing Heidi, she made an appointment for a drive-up COVID test for later that morning, something to which Heidi objected but to which she acquiesced at my urging. At 11:15 I went out and started my truck, letting it run to warm the cabin and thaw the windshield.
Begrudgingly, she dressed herself in an overcoat, a neck scarf, and knee-high galoshes over her pajamas as she complained bitterly about being tired and the cold and the ice and how she just wanted to rest. This merely served to steel my resolve, insisting that she make her way to my truck, post haste.
Slowly, we navigated the ice covered streets, cautiously making our way to the clinic as Heidi explained in no uncertain terms that she did not want her brain poked with foot-long wooden dowels masquerading as Q-tips. Surprisingly, we arrived at the clinic without incident, registered with the nurse, and awaited the brain-poking as Heidi once again explained how this was bullshit and that it didn’t matter in the long run because she either had COVID or didn’t, rendering the testing exercise academic.
At that very moment the nurse reappeared and Heidi submitted as the nurse gently swabbed her nose, took her oxygen saturation reading, and sent us on our way. She seemed unperturbed, which I found as surprising as our uneventful time on the road as I drove to the grocers to pick up a host of cold remedies and a salad for Heidi’s lunch. She waited patiently in the truck as I picked out all the things she would need for the next few days anticipating the worst: A diagnosis of COVID-19.
When I got her home, she returned to the couch and her reality TV as I put some leftover soup on the stove and prepared her salad. After serving them to her on the couch, I heard the familiar beep on my phone, indicating I had a message. I retrieved my phone and saw a message from the clinic app, indicating my COVID test results were in.
I gingerly opened it expecting a positive COVID diagnosis.
SARS-CoV-2: Not Detected
If that sounds like a happy ending, I suppose it is. Nobody wants that disease and everything it drags with it—but that’s not really the happy ending I wanted to tell. The happy ending that should interest you is that this is how I spent Valentines Day. I spent it with my wife but it wasn’t a dinner out, or a dinner in, or a romantic getaway, or an annual vacation.
It was time spent dealing with the day-to-day events of a life lived together. Just one of countless moments in which we demonstrate what I call love. Love, it seems to me, is found in the basic day-to-day challenges, as nice and as necessary as those other so-called romantic things are. Those things, in my opinion, actually represent a break from what real love means to me:
The slogging through the day-in and day-out events of life, which are seldom pretty and can’t be wrapped in a heart-shaped box or folded into a beautiful card.
And I like to think that’s ultimately what Saint Valentine hoped to achieve.
Guy-o
