My Valentine

“I haven’t even started this week’s blog post!” I cry to Amy, my life coach friend on the phone today. “I don’t know what to write about.” I am in the fitness center on the bottom floor of the Hampton Inn and Suites in Owensboro, Kentucky where Nick and I have come for a three-night visit. It is 18 degrees outside, the sky a steel grey above the brown Ohio River. Every tree in sight is a spindly ball, each branch and twig wrapped in a delicate cocoon of ice. It looks almost like an art installation. Nick has agreed to open for his comedian friend, Rodney Carrington in a Nashville comedy club called Zanie’s next week, so we have taken the opportunity to visit my family, a two-hour drive from Nashville. I have endured 24 minutes on the treadmill because one of the two elliptical machines had a sign posted – this machine is temporarily out of order. Nick jumped on the one working elliptical, leaving me to choose between the one working treadmill or the one working recumbent bicycle. He didn’t even offer me the elliptical, which is par for the course. 

After barely getting my heartrate up on the treadmill, I half-heartedly lift some light hand weights. My plan is to do some ab work next and I wave to Nick on the recumbent bike to get his attention. He is distracted, barely pedaling, listening to something on his phone through his hearing aids. “Are you just going to do cardio?” I ask.

“Maybe. I did weights yesterday,” he yells to me. 

“How much longer do you have? We need to do some abs.” He finishes his five minutes and I lead him through three sets of ab exercises while he complains. When he heads up to the room, I drape myself over the limp exercise ball to stretch and make my call to Amy.

“It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow, why don’t you write about that?” Amy says. “You could write about how much you love your husband. ”

I can’t even think of a response. 

“You guys have a great relationship. You could call it Ode to Nick.” she adds.

“I don’t think so, Amy. That’s not me.” 

“This could give you a chance to be more vulnerable in your writing. It would be great.”

When I get up to the room, Nick has planted himself at the built-in desk where he is watching the Valentine’s weekend edition of WWE Wrestling. As I pass him, he yells to me, “Will you scratch my shoulder? Down, right, right, not under my shirt, just on top!” He never remembers that other people can hear.

“Perfect Valentine’s Day plans, watching the WWE Valentine’s match!” I yell while I scratch his itch. I take a shower and while getting dressed for dinner with my family, tell him about Amy’s suggestion. He knows I am stumped about what to write this week.

“Amy suggested that I write about Valentine’s Day,” I say.

“And how we’re going to ignore it because we’ve had enough?” Nick asks, looking for his coat. Just this morning, before leaving Nashville, Nick and I went to Kroger’s to pick up some wine and beer to take to my sister’s house for dinner. The place was packed with people gathering up armfuls of candy and cards and flowers and balloons and food. What was all the food for? Neither of us had really even registered that tomorrow was Valentine’s Day. “Oh my gosh, look at all this crap. Please don’t get me any of this stuff. I mean, come on, we’ve been celebrating Valentine’s Day for thirty five…million years.” This was my latest marriage joke, one in the spirit of the others like, “Enough is enough,” and “Marriage should have an expiration date.”

“No, we’ve celebrated thirty-seven million Valentine’s days, including the two years we were dating,” Nick had said.

“Unreal,” I had answered, passing the Valentine’s M&Ms without a second glance.

“Amy thinks I should write about Valentine’s Day and how much I love you,” I say, looking for the hotel door key card. “She thinks it would be a good opportunity for me to be more vulnerable. I told her that being vulnerable is not my thing. I mean, nobody expects that from me. Nobody wants that from me.”

“Leslie, no one would even believe it. You can’t even fake it.”

Now that’s the kind of Valentine I’m looking for! Someone who knows the real me and loves me anyway. Nick knows that I’m not touchy feely in the least. I don’t express my feelings very readily and I like showing my love instead of talking about it. Everyone knows that I don’t go around sprinkling love words everywhere. My love is a solid and silent kind of love. One time, Nick got on my Facebook page and posted, “I love my husband, Nick so much! He is the smartest and most handsome man in the whole world.” Within ten seconds, my sister, Heather had commented, “Leslie’s been hacked,” and Deb had commented, “Nick, get off Leslie’s Facebook!”

But I have expressed this love in Valentine cards to Nick over and over, year after year after year, all through the eighties and the nineties and the two thousands. I am pretty good with words, but how many different ways can one person come up with to say I love you? And Nick did the same. Plus, he was required to add gifts to the mix, which he gave generously — lingerie and chocolates, high heels and chocolates, flowers and chocolates and t-shirts and jewelry and lotions and candles and more chocolates, romantic dinners and weekend get-aways. An old boyfriend used to say that Valentine’s Day was a plot concocted by Hallmark as a money-making scheme. While Nick is not that cynical about Valentine’s Day, he’s simply worn out by it. So I have let him off the hook.

Let me illustrate what real love is, real, long-lasting committed love. Getting into bed at the hotel in Nashville last night, Nick started this groaning and sighing that I had been noticing for a week or two but had not mentioned. “What’s with all the groaning and moaning? My god, every time you move you act like you’re dying,” I said, pulling the covers back. He laughed and did an impression of himself moaning. “I’ve gained so much weight. I feel so fat. I want to go on that cleanse with you and Ted when we get home.” He settled himself in bed with his back to me and put his hearing aids on the nightstand. I turned off the light. I was glad to hear that he was ready to make a change. His doctor had even informed him that he needed to make some changes. And I really did feel his pain. “Being fat really is uncomfortable,” I said in the dark. “Being fat is no fun, for sure.” Lifting his shaved head off the pillow, he yelled, “Batteries?!” 

“What?” I asked. 

“I heard batteries.” 

“Good lord,” I yelled loud enough for him to hear me. We laughed and I asked him, “How many more millions of years do we have to go?”

“
your homecoming will be my homecoming-
my selves go with you,only i remain;
a shadow phantom effigy or seeming
(an almost someone always who’s noone)
a noone who,till their and your returning,
spends the forever of his loneliness
dreaming their eyes have opened to your mourning

feeling their stars have risen through your skies:
so,in how merciful love’s own name,linger
no more than selfless i can quite endure
the absence of that moment when a stranger
takes in his arms my very lifes who’s you
-when all fears hopes beliefs doubts disappear.
Everywhere and joy’s perfect wholeness we’re
“
(the poem I read to Nick at our wedding) – e.e. cummings