My favorite version of the Valentine’s Day story is the one where poor jailed Val picked heart-shaped violet leaves and poked holes in them to send love notes to the jailer’s blind daughter, who was then able to see.
Well, as most of you know, I’m gay married to a cop and we’ve been together almost 8 years. And after 8 years, I’ve washed enough underwear, listened to enough dirty jokes and moved enough coffee cups to the (goddam) dishwasher from the (f’n) sink to fill a warehouse. Like most enduring relationships, it becomes stronger when you see your beloved for who he really is. It’s hard to picture a knight in shining armor using a nose hair trimmer, but they all do. Imagine if they didn’t! So I’m stuck with Cap’n, nose hair removal and all, and he’s a wonderful man who would do anything for me… except pick up after his own damn self. He tries, but the gerbil on the wheel in his head gets distracted by shiny things on the way to the laundry hamper. We fight about the socks on the floor, then he wraps two big arms around me and I realize that nothing bad can happen to me, ever again, and what was I thinking about and why is my shirt now on the floor with the socks?
Things like this ratchet up the difficulty of selecting a Valentine’s Day gift. Cliches won’t work.
Cap’n Crocker is a man of particular tastes and not all of them are refined, which should make it easy, right? No. He loves tulips, so last year I got him 100 of them. His allergic reaction was truly amazing. His poor nose was like Victoria Falls. Lovely! They graced the desk in our condo’s lobby for 10 days.
The prior year I threw a Valentine’s Day cocktail party for just us. I forgot that what I was using as a mixer for the Aphrodisia-tinis already had vodka in it. We woke up at 3 AM, cotton-mouthed and fully clothed in the living room. There was one candle still lit, and Edmund Pevensie (one of our cats) had indulged in the gravlax left on my plate and puked in my shoe. Lucy Pevensie (Edmund’s sister) was looking at us with feline pity. Romance – and cat barf – was in the air.
What to do? Well, after wracking my brain, I came up with an idea. Cap’n is a social butterfly at his precinct, and while he does go on patrol from time to time, he’s mostly in an open office with about a dozen other cops. They just completed a huge project today, and cops love to eat together, so I sent a Valentine’s treat basket of cheeses, salami, fruit and crackers to Cap’n at the precinct to be delivered tomorrow. The card?
Dear Mike, I hope you think this isn’t cheesy. You can share with your friends or hide the salami. They say you are what you eat, but don’t turn into a cracker. You are a big fruit. Love, Me.
He will be teased and pretend to be irked when his Commanding Officer grabs the card and reads it out loud in a Brooklyn accent, which could make a fortune cookie hilarious. But he will be all happy that I thought of his friends. And we’ll still go out for dinner on Sunday and make lurve.
But 8 years in, you have to get creative.
