My Valentine

Today I shared the story of my storybook romance. They listened kindly as I told how my eyes met his across a grand piano during our first rehearsal as singing waiters. How it was my 20th birthday, and I spent the next few days thinking about the boy from Waterloo with the brilliant smile – the one whose last name I could not remember. I just knew he was Mark, the kind, smiley guy who – unlike the other seven of us – attended a different college.

Who made the first move, they asked?

I’m not really sure, I answered.

They didn’t believe me, so I continue to tell our tale. They could decide.

Sometime that fall he began bussing my tables. Then he asked if I would take the drink orders for his tables because he found it morally reprehensible. I agreed, but not without challenging him.

“Isn’t that hypocritical?” I asked. “You agreed to take a job that you are not actually doing. I am doing it for you at your request. How does that make it better?”

He was a singing waiter, I reminded him. A job that was 50 percent music and 50 percent customer service. Our octet shared gratuities, and we wanted the income from his bar tabs too. I didn't drink alcohol either, but I kept taking the drink orders. It was my job. He kept bussing my tables. He thought I flirted with all the male singers but him. I thought I was joking around, and that he didn’t joke.

Soon he began driving me home after work, and we began discussing issues important to us. I wanted to know why he believed women couldn’t be pastors, and he wanted to know why I thought I could claim to be a child of God.

I wondered if he would attend a dance with me.

He wondered if I would attend church with him.

During a break at one of our special Christmas shows, we sat at a table drinking coffee. I told him I was in love with his voice (it’s all I yet dared to love). He wondered privately if I had considered loving the rest of him too.

After our New Year’s Eve dinner show, he drove me to his home to spend the night, waiting for a snowstorm to pass. We talked by his fireplace until 4 a.m., his little brother a tired chaperone on the couch. I watched him carry his sleeping brother upstairs, helping him into bed. Then I watched him ready his own bedroom for me. Later, unaware only three hours had passed, I wandered downstairs to keep his father company as he mopped their kitchen floor. It was 7 a.m.; no one else was awake.

“Good morning.” I announced myself to his father, the owner of the house.

“Well, hello. Have a seat in our dining room while I finish in here. Can I get you a cup of coffee and some toast?”

“Umm, sure.”

We shared the smallest of small talk. But then I wanted to know: “If you don’t mind my asking, why are you mopping the floor at 7 a.m. on New Year’s Day?”

“Well,” he started slowly, pensively. “I promised Carolyn Ann I would mop the kitchen floor, and I thought it would be good to start my year off right.”

Ah, I thought. This Mark, this 6-foot boy with the beautiful smile, comes from very good stock.

The next week I was attending classes at my college again, but he was waiting for classes to begin at his. On Thursday of that first week of the year, I stood beside my Lutheran campus pastor, fulfilling my duties as the chapel cantor. The first time I looked into the congregation from behind the altar I saw him – a Southern Baptist boy – sitting in a row near the front. His hymnal was open, and he was following the service as best he could. Afterward he met me in the hallway with two questions: Do you have time before your next class? (Yes) What is this thing about the holy uterus, does it have something to do with Mary? (Laughter.)

"Holy Eucharist, you mean?" His embarrassment. Our commitment to continue figuring each other out.

There had been no kissing. There still wouldn’t be. Just more talks – debates really – about God, life, salvation, churches, families. We lacked agreement on many things, but we shared something more that surpassed all else. We laughed together. Joyfully. Had fun together. Willingly. We cared about things together. Deeply. We questioned things. Sincerely.

And then Valentine’s Day. A dozen roses delivered with a card that read: “Friends are friends forever.” I knew how the phrase should end. He sang it every night that we worked at the restaurant. This time it was for me.

One day later another of our dinner shows. The day after that a dance, a Mardi Gras Dance. And he danced, this Baptist boy. He was surprised I was surprised he would. I was surprised when he left the dance floor because a song with "questionable lyrics" was playing. But then the music slowed. We returned to the dance floor. He pulled me close. Tight. And REO Speedwagon described the predicament we faced. We couldn’t fight the feelings any more, or remember what we had started fighting them for. He made sure his eyes found mine as the song played. They locked on and didn’t let go even as the song ended.

We walked off the floor together, closer than hand-in-hand. Later his lips found mine – finally – and we said good night in the stairwell of my dormitory, only hours away from morning.

What had we done? What had begun?

I could not have known then but I certainly know now – 27 years later. That night I began to share my days more fully with my soul’s partner. Someone I could trust with my life. My love.

He is my Valentine.
I am forever his.
He is forever mine.

Happy Valentine’s Day, Mark. I love you.

Love - or, What Happened to Mark and Joy?

It is practically impossible to avoid the topic of love this time of year, isn't it? On Friday, I was compelled to record my thoughts on the topic. Here's what bubbled forth.





What happened to Mark and Joy? I am not fully sure. If I had to sum it up in a word: Love. Love happened to Mark and Joy. And I'm so grateful. I'll never be the same.


Stay tuned for how we celebrated Valentine's Day. I'll post it sometime tomorrow. And guess what? Mark vlogged with me! Truly. Now that's love.

Peeking at the Past

Trudie, a friend from my college days, posted a comment in response to a recent blog that sounded as if she could see one of the photos hanging on Mark's office wall all the way from her home on our nation's east coast. The photo is a personal favorite: a black and white, 11x 14 of me singing "New York, New York," while dressed in an 80s-era white jumpsuit."

A friend named Patrick Simmons took the photo; and I remember feeling grateful that he'd captured the moment, for I had not wanted the song to end. If I could, I'd have hung that note – that night – in the air forever. Because of Pat's photo, it sorta has.

But, that was 1985, and since then, the photo has only existed on Mark's wall and the pages of a Wartburg College Fortress yearbook. Trudie's e-comment this week prompted me to go to Mark's office, take the framed print down and scan it into my computer so the image can exist in the digital realm, maybe forever. Right?

But a funny thing happened on my way to the scanner. I found a paper hanging from the same nail as the framed photo, hidden behind it apparently since 2004 – according to the date on the paper. It was a print out of a memory I'd posted on a message board known as Millaweb, a forum for Waldorf alumni and friends who are all somehow connected to Brian Miller, class of 1998. My memory - a contribution to a thread topic on romantic memories - described the first Valentine's Day Mark and I shared in 1985, two days before our first kiss.

That five-year-old paper is evidence that Mark also tries to capture memories, and interestingly, he's now given me a new romantic memory to treasure: finding his hidden archive.

Our differences are striking. Mark constantly cautions me to live in the moment because life is perishable, while I constantly collect moments to relive so they won't have fully perished. He secretly archives memories, while I post them for the world.

I hope our differences deepen our alliance, keeping us fascinated about the history we've shared while anticipating a future we are creating moment by memorable moment. I guess I'll find out when Mark discovers that I've now posted his hidden memory for the whole world to see.

I simply can't help myself.

While I had not forgotten our first Valentine's Day, I had forgotten that I'd once shared the story with others. Thanks to Mark, I again have the story for safe keeping as I told it in 2004, because Millaweb – once a lively forum for Brian's college cohorts and colleagues – has become his personal place of preservation, a home for photos and stories of his young family's perishable moments. As it should be. (And, come on, alliteration is fun, yes?)

Therefore, I must post my memory of our first Valentine's Day again – this time in a digital realm that might outlast the paper that's still hanging behind the photo on Mark's office wall – because we need to peek at the past every once in a while, don't we. We need to cherish moments as we live them, for life is perishable - each minute as fleeting as the next.

So capture your cherished moments. Suspend them in time anyway you know how, for one day you'll appreciate the capacity they have to propel you into the future, bolstered by the formidable fuel that is your invincible past.

_________________


My First Valentine’s Love

Once, when I was a junior in college, I was on my dorm floor making fun of all the girls who were being visited by the floral delivery guy. When the guy ventured onto our floor again (for like the fifth time) a couple other girls and I started taunting him: “You’re back? So who’s it for this time? Don’t you have anything better to do?”

Well, he said: “These are for someone named Joy.”

Man, did those girls turn on me! I had no idea that this very cute guy I worked with as a singing waiter was planning to send me a dozen roses! I’m certain I blushed; I know I was very embarrassed. Best of all, the card read: “Friends are Friends Forever.” (See … I’d been telling the girls that we were “just friends.”)

Needless to say I started to pay even closer attention to this man with an incredible smile who’d spent dozens of evenings lingering while saying goodnight, but never once attempting a goodnight kiss. Insanely enough, he’d managed to have me fall in love with his voice, then become increasingly intrigued by all other aspects of him simply by driving me home, hanging out to eat boatloads of chocolate (hot chocolate with chocolate truffle mousse topped with Hershey’s kisses was a favorite), and arguing about whether or not women should be ministers.

Yes, those girls were at our wedding and still hold a very special place in my heart. They are probably the last ones to see me as a young woman whose life was fully her own and the first ones to see what it meant for me to become blissfully attached to someone forever.

*leaving to go find Mark*
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