Gestures and Overtures

I’m big on romantic gestures. I like to think I’m the kind of guy who can make someone special, feel special. I think that’s part of why my wife, who shall remain nameless in these pages, married me. In high school, they used to sell Valentines roses to support school sports, and you could buy a rose and have it delivered. In my senior year, I think I bought twenty-five roses. Part of that was because I was a flirt, and part of it was to disguise the fact that one of those twenty five really was special to me, and I couldn’t say it, and I couldn’t show it, but I also couldn’t not show it. So I bought twenty-four others. But that’s another story.

With Valentine’s Day coming up, my wife and I have been talking about romantic gestures from past VDays. And since she never reads these pages (she’d not big into modern media, preferring watercolors to PhotoShop and snail mail to e-mail) I feel free to talk about some of them here.

I think a Valentine’s Day gesture is important. This year I’m giving my wife a small potted live flowering plant, and a pile of books wrapped in a red ribbon. Not much, beyond a gesture, but the gesture is about what it means, not about size. In past years, depending on how busy our lives were, we’ve exchanged chocolate, a stuffed elephant rocking horse (before we had kids), the usual satiny undergarments, music, and handcrafted redeemable cards, in addition to the stuff I'll go into below.

The biggest gestures don’t require big bucks. Anything costs money, but it’s all relative. Show me someone who needs to buy the dozen long stemmed reds on Vday, and I’ll show you someone with either a big disposable income, or very new in a relationship. Not being either, I’m kind of over the long stemmed reds.

Okay, a digression here for a second—I never buy roses on Valentine’s Day. Late in college, coincidentally around the time I couldn’t affort them, I identified this as a scam, and refused participation. Roses get their prices jacked up for this one day, and become priceless in their scarcity. For a while, just to have roses though, I would purchase them, but the week after Valentines Day. They last just as long—often far longer because you’re not scratching the bottom of the barrel for them. And my wife prefers pink roses to red ones, so that just makes it all the easier. If you can get your mate to identify the same and you can do your romantic part after the fact, you’ve got something golden.

The biggest gesture I ever made on Vday didn’t involve reds. When we lived in Park Slope, there was a Korean grocery down the block from us that always had a large assortment of tulips, seemingly year-round. Alongside these they had the usual accoutrements, baby’s breath, fern, and the ubiquitous roses around Vday. But, as I said, I don’t buy roses on Vday.

But I think it is important to celebrate. I saw a scene in a movie with Christian Slater (I can’t recall the exact flick, but the scene stays with me) where he has a room full of red roses delivered as a gesture. Now, early in our relationship we were DINKS (double income, no kids-do they use that term anymore?) but I was still cheap, though big on gestures. So what I did early on in our relationship, was buy out their stock of tulips, of every color from red to yellow to white. It took several trips, but again, it was down the street. When my wife-to-be walked into to a living room brightly lit with every lamp in the apartment, and a rainbow of tulips filling every vessel in the place capable of holding water.

The most expensive Valentine’s gift I ever got was my wedding ring, which we picked out at a local craft shop in Brooklyn. It’s crafted from the pattern of an antique New England scroll, and is thick enough (I thought at the time I got it) so that I’ll know it’s something. It’s less a ring than a bracelet on my finger. It’s created a permanent ridge on my left hand. But it’s the only piece of jewelry that I wear regularly, or that I’ve worn at all this long. I got my wife her ring at the same place, crafted by David Virtue, which is a name that she knows and people say like I ought to. I just like it because, with its vine scrollwork and flowers, it matches mine, and isn’t the standard gold band.

My favorite Valentine’s gift was something else. My wife is a painter, and when we were dating, she had a set of oil sticks that I really liked. Oil sticks are partially solidified oil paints, held together b a cardboard tube that you slowly peel away. The oil comes out semi-liquidy, but not like paint from a tube-closer to oil pastels, but big and chunky and juicy and fun as hell. But oil sticks, like crayons, wear away noticeably with use, so they’re not the kind of thing you can share. It’s sort of like sharing a lollipop—sure you can do it, but it gets gross and messy after a while and just ruins the enjoyment for both. And at the time I was an illustrator, and not really a painter, in the sense that color scared me to death. But I liked those paint sticks, because they combined painting and drawing. I could build up layer after layer in oil, and their nature was such that they’d dry quickly, They’d be workable for a day or two days, then set, and I could work over the top of them completely. Man, I wanted some of those, but not being a “painter”, and being cheap, I couldn’t justify the expense. I had a full set of student grade oil paints that I’d bought in art school that were just going to waste. So, for Vday, she bought me a full set (okay, there’s no such thing as a full set, because these are paints, and you can always get more colors, but a large set nonetheless) of oil sticks. That was the start of my serious painting period. I still have several pieces that I finished over the next two years, until the paint sticks were less than a half inch long. That was a turning point for me and color, and today I don’t have the same stigmas. We’re the best of friends, and occasional lovers. Of course, I’ve developed entirely new ones. I realized the other day when I pulled several of these old oil paintings out of my Mom’s attic, that I miss those oil sticks. I may get myself a set when I go into NYC next week. I may just go into another painting frenzy.

But I digress.

I tend to like Vday, and always have, though I suspect I'm just barely in the majority. But, given my race, my viewpoints, and the last two elections, it's a position I'm getting used to. But, nonetheless, I think I’m a romantic guy at heart, as Jewel sang, "I'm sensitive, and I'd like to stay that way." That kind of stuff has always been important to me. But wearing your heart on your sleeve tends to get it dirty, so I don’t often show it. Not often. Maybe just once a year.

Have a great Valentine’s Day.