Valentine’s day is imminent.  And Sal and I have been together for 50 years.  I really should be traditionally romantic at least ONCE in my life, don’t you think?  But there’s a problem with that…I am generally a very romantic fella and I ‘lay it on kinda thick’ most of the time.  Every day, actually.  I am a romantic.  Like an Italian – obnoxiously so.

To be honest, I am kinda sickening about it if viewed from a bird’s eye (read: normal person’s) perspective – but I don’t view it from up there (laws of physics and aging limit my air-time these days).  Sal sometimes rolls her eyes.  And she has groaned.  I know it is all a BIT much at times, but a romantic has to do what a romantic has to do.  And I call her the ‘ol’ Puddin’, too (but that is mainly because I think ‘ol’ Puddin’ is really stupid-funny and I have been saying that for years for my own amusement.  I started calling her that when she was just 17.  OK, I have an odd sense of humour….. 

‘Sweetie-pie’ and such is not just an endearment, it has become Sally’s daily-use name.  ‘Course, ‘Sweetie-pie’ is interchangeable as to the sexes and Sal uses that for me, too.  Worse, we use ‘Sweetie-pie’ for my son and daughter quite a bit as well.  Daughter is OK with it but my son (especially when he was in high school) admonished me for using the term too loosely around his friends.  So, I compromised.  He became the much more masculine, ‘Sweetie’.  NO pie.

But, like most compromises, no one was very happy about it (except his friends).  I went back to Sweetie-pie.  He is now 37.  I am gonna hafta change.  Fortunately, I have grandchildren on whom I will burden such a cursed moniker.  It will help toughen them up.

But back to Val’s day……one cannot get too romantic with a women whose leg just went through major surgery so I am gonna have to get creative.  Hmmmm….we DO have a lot of pain-killers at the moment……

The easiest route to Sally’s heart, of course, is Roger’s Chocolates.  I have mended many wounds and bruised hearts over the past five decades with chocolate and Roger’s is by far the best over-the-counter remedy.  Flowers work but, you know how it is….we live in the forest and nature’s beauty is omnipresent for us.  Still, they can’t hurt.

But I need to stretch, think outside the usual charm offensive (charm: which I understand is now a smidge offensive to anyone belonging to the Me Too movement).  Dinner out is out.  Sal’s leg won’t allow for that quite yet.  A handful of diamonds is out….perhaps it shouldn’t be but it is at least out of reach right now.

We could just settle for bubbly, flowers and chocolate and some minor billing and cooing but, somehow, methinks that is NOT going to be sufficient to get her in the right mood.  And, what would we do if it did change her mood to something worse (repercussions of the Me Too)?  There is nothing quite as romantically off-putting as a tangly-haired woman grimacing in pain and telling me what to do – ‘get me a pillow and, damn it, do it quickly!’

That is NOT the kind of pillow-talk I am aiming for.

Hmmmm…..they say that absence makes the heart grow fonder…….