Valentine’s Day

I will never know a love like this again. It was a few days before Valentine’s Day in 1974 that we met for the second time. The first time was a few years before, introduced by a mutual friend. We needed to let life knock the wind out of us before we realized we had a connection. I was a writer and poet and she a bookseller. A match made in the stacks between facts and fiction.

It was sheer luck that the two of us met, and I have thanked the gods every day for placing her in my path, and for whatever she saw in me that gave me the opportunity to prove my love and adoration for her. I would tell all my friends that I was punching above my weight and the luckiest guy on the planet, and I truly was. Most couples I know don’t have what we had.

We had forty-six years of marriage. I have spent these last four with her in my dreams, surprised that she isn’t next to me when I wake in the morning. It is 2026 and this Valentine’s Day would have been our fiftieth.

I have always had a weakness for love stories, and I have memorialized ours hundreds of times since she left this mortal world. A man we both admired, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, died shortly after she did, and I whispered to myself that even the great Thích Nhất Hạnh couldn’t stand a world without my bride in it.

The focus here is Valentine’s Day, but during the year, for no apparent reason, I would leave a poem I had written to celebrate a real or imagined milestone on the dining room table and, if time permitted, a bouquet of flowers. I taught my sons that a random act of kindness was more impactful than one chained to an expected event. It didn’t take a birthday to shower your grandmother with flowers and a note explaining your gratitude for her love and affection.

I have always been a romantic, but when you see a photo of my wife, as she shares her moods with the eye of the camera and its holder, you will begin to understand why my heart beat faster when I rested my eyes on her.

Growing up in a photographer’s home, I learned at my father’s workbench the craft he had perfected in the streets of the Bronx during the Depression and plied in the fields of war-torn Europe during WWII. A craft that became a hobby when he couldn’t earn a living from it after the war. I developed an eye for composition and the importance of the angle of light as it kisses the subject. But capturing the magic of the moment requires more than craft, more than knowing where to stand or how the light falls. It happens when the subject exceeds the limits of the medium, when the power of the image, like a laser, is taken in by the eye and immediately finds one or more heartstrings to pull upon. She was that subject.

So the question becomes, who was she? What about her was larger than life? What made people turn their heads when she walked into a room? What made her friends and family want to share an odd or funny happening with her just to hear her laughter, sometimes a peal and sometimes from the belly, but always unique? I will never forget a wedding we attended where I made the mistake of allowing my friend Irwin to sit beside her at the service. He was irrepressible, and she could shapeshift from a wise elder to a giggling teen in a matter of seconds. Luckily the bride and groom were so intent on expressing their love for each other that only those seated in front and behind us heard them chortle.

When I first met her she would begin a statement and never finish it because she had grown up in a family of interrupters. She, the youngest of the sisters, was left tugging on her Glaswegian father’s shirtsleeves to get a word in edgewise, cut off by her older sister or ignored by her father as the two would fight about topics that held no real importance. He with his thick Scottish, almost indecipherable brogue, and her sister eight years older going toe to toe with her father.

As we grew older together she became an on-the-edge-of-your-seat kind of storyteller. Our children and their children, even our friends, would sit almost hypnotized as she wove her tale. They were entranced, and as you might have realized, I was as well.

Now that the subject has jumped off the page and sits firmly in your mind’s eye, we can return to the holiday that will be celebrated across this country with roses, chocolates, and diamonds. There will be countless lovers on bended knees with rings outstretched or hidden in cupcakes or other such subterfuge this February 14th. But you will find me sitting on the floor with albums, tracing our journey from days of tie-dye, bell bottoms, and Frye boots through sidelines cheering for one son or the other, and finally her ziplining over Victoria Falls with her girlfriends in her sixties. But my favorites are pictures of us two, entwined in one form or another, our love for each other as clear as Cupid’s arrow on a box of chocolates.

With love and gratitude

Danny

February 13, 2026