So today was Valentine Day and as usual my old girl managed to stretch it out for a week or so. Last Monday we drove a 300 mile round trip so that I could buy her some See's candy, which isn't sold anywhere close by and we could only find it in a temporary kiosk at North Star Mall in San Antonio and it that was only going to be there from the 5th through the 14th except it wasn't really because the bad weather delayed the candy shipment but we were lucky that it got there the same day we did although we had to kill about four hours waiting for the folks to get the kiosk set up and open for business but that was OK because in the meantime we got to visit the Pioneer Mills museum and then see an exhibit on piranhas and other Amazon stuff at the Witte museum and have an awesome lunch at J. Alexander's. Yeah, I know that's a hell of a run on sentence but sometimes you just need one of those, know what I mean?
Anyway, our Valentine week started with that road trip to San Antonio and included another to Bandera as well as a couple of other lunches and some flowers from the supermarket. They were nice looking, though, although cheap ... which is really the subject of this post. Cheap, I mean.
Because one thing you didn't see me mention about this seven-day Valentine extravaganza was an expensive Valentine card. The reason is that we don't buy them anymore. The way that started was that my wife's parents reached retirement age and ran headlong into the "lots of time but no money" problem that most of us encounter. One of the ways they dealt with that was to use the same anniversary card for 20 years. Each year one of them would give it to the other one and the next year that one would give it back and so on for twenty years. When my wife and I were middle-aged and earning viable income we thought this was one of those quaint old folks things. Then we became quaint old folks and started doing it ourselves, along with other habits that our parents had become addicted to like never touching doorknobs and never laying your silverware down on a table at a restaurant. Yeah, like you don't do that too. OK. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and pretend that you haven't started adopting those old fart idiosyncrasies yet. We did though and we took the card thing even further.
We don't give each other the same anniversary card, birthday card, Christmas card or valentine every year like my wife's parents did. Instead we dive into this huge moving box full of cards that we had given to each other in years past, and also cards that others have given to us, and we pick out a few to read to each other on the appropriate holiday or anniversary. So this morning we each selected about ten valentines from years past and read them to each other while we drank our pre-breakfast coffee and watched the History Channel's “Only in America with Larry the Cable Guy” which we had recorded a couple of nights ago. We had ten times the sentiment and none of the cost of buying a new $5 Hallmark card for each other.
We've been doing this for several years now and last year we decided that we really wanted to give each other a new card because we sort of knew most of the old ones by heart. We still didn't want to spend the money on the cards though. So we went into a Hallmark Crown store a couple of days before last Valentine Day and we looked over the valentines. Each of us picked out an ostentatious and expensive card with just the right sentiment that we wanted the other one to hear. I read my wife the one I had picked out for her and she did the same for me. We stood there for a few minutes admiring the valentines that we had picked out for each other and then we put them back in the rack. After that we went to Baskin-Robbins and used the ten bucks we had saved by not buying cards to get a couple of scoops of Love Potion 31. How sweet it is!
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