Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Happy Valentine's Day!



Yes, it is that lovely/depressing holiday once again. Depending upon your romantic state you really dread this date, or it can be so filled with promise and expectation. Or, I guess, any of the myriad of emotions that falls between those two. I haven't had that many V Days without a "somebody" in the picture. The ones where there was no one seemed sort of strange to me.

Last year Mr. Handsome Honey sent me flowers for VDay and had them delivered to the office. It was the first time he sent me flowers and they were lovely.

Yesterday morning I got into the office and saw the florist box on my desk and was surprised again by a dozen lovely red roses. The card read, "Just being with you makes me a better man." Umm, all together now, "Awwwwwwww." How sweet is that? The man is amazing. I can only imagine that I've made him a more patient man, because I can be a real pain in the ass. I'm convinced that, although he is the most even tempered man ever to walk the face of the earth, he must want to wring my neck on occasion. Yet, he stands by what he wrote. I am so keeping him!

Yesterday, I was over at Moo Cow's catching up and read his lovely repeat post of a VDay in the past where he must have made a lonely girl's day (it's just below the Peep Olympics post, which killed me) . From the Norton Anthology the girl was reading he assumed she was a sophomore. This reminded me of my sophomore year Valentine's Day.

It was the first VDay with the man who would one day be my first fiance. (Of course, he was found out to be a total jerk before he would have become my first husband. ) I was sort of surprised as the day went on that I didn't get any kind of acknowledgment of the holiday. The college campus is such a small world and things like Valentine's Day are huge events, along with Greek Week and Spring Break and Homecoming and anything else that can be thought up for the students to fixate upon. He did buy me flowers and they had been delivered to the house, but I didn't see them. Why you may ask? Well, that would be the doing of Zoid.

Zoid was the self-proclaimed president of Eben Street. For whatever reason, Madam Zoid didn't like the roses that had been delivered for me. They reminded her of an old boyfriend and so she removed them from her view. She threw them out the back door of the house. Later she told me what she did and I retreived my couple of crumpled roses. I would have never found them otherwise since, no one went out the back door of the Eben Street house.

This was a rundown college rental. When you stepped into the kitchen the refrigerator door opened. Someone flushed the upstairs toilet, even though we had "out of order" signs (with lots of caps and exclamation points and such) on the bathroom door and a vacuum cleaner on top of the toilet seat to indicate that it should not be used. This caused a waterfall on the first floor. I think it was when I retrieved my flowers that I finally saw what had become of the vacuum cleaner. Whoever flooded the house didn't like our warning devices and had thrown it out the second story bathroom window, which led to the five feet of what was technically the "back yard" before the next door neighbor's fence and driveway.

The gas oven had a pilot that took a while to catch. Not that we cooked much, but we quickly learned to not stand directly in front of the oven door when you first opened it. Often, the gas would escape before the pilot lit, at which point, all the gas would ignite. If you were standing in front of the oven when you first opened the door, you were bound to have your eyebrows and lashes singed as the flame followed the escaped gas across the kitchen. The oven was not generally a problem for Zoid. On any given day you would find her coming in, putting a pot of water to boil on the stovetop and then heading off to drop off her books or do whatever she did until the boiling began. Once when asked what she was making, she replied, "I don't know, but it all starts like this." She was also fond of eating whatever she found in the fridge, but she wasn't alone in this. To this day if we get together at someone's shore house, you will find a container of some snack food (now, usually Chauncey's famous Betty salad) with a fork or forks in it to facilitate ease of eating directly from the fridge. I remember a roast ( someone's leftovers from home) on a plate in the fridge with a fork stuck into it. And bite marks from someone picking it up with the fork and just taking a chomp out of it.

Yikes! My college days are sometimes to silly and/or frightening to recall. I miss my pal Zoid, who may very well be the most complex person I have ever met. I wonder if she would even recognize the girl she was so many years ago. I do not, however, miss that terrible boy who sent me the flowers.

I'll try to post again soon. Maybe it'll be something contemporary, maybe another of my strange brain farts, or one of my "theories." Maybe I'll tell you more about the sad and melodramatic tale of Mr. Sparky.

2 comments:

Judy Krueger said...

Great Valentine's Day story! The part about the toilet with the signs and the vacuum cleaner was the best. Reminding me of college days, you made me realize that even when I get really busy and our house is a pit and there is no good food in the fridge, it is like Good Housekeeping here compared to those days. In our college house we had a revolving bowl of tuna with mayo and onions that anyone could eat from; we put it on saltines. Could be why I feel deprived now when all there is to eat is tuna.

JoanneMarie Faust said...

How did we live like that? I still shake my head in wonder at the way my friends and I lived. My mother would have been apalled had she seen us in action.