More on Valentine's Day

I went downstairs this morning and there was no newspaper on the front stoop. So I'll continue with my ruminations on Valentine's Day.

My wife, at the beginning of our relationship, used to coach me days before February 14 to make sure that I had gifts ready to go. I couldn't understand why it was so important; it seemed unreal and insincere to me -- the candy, the flowers, the cloying cards, the candlelight dinners. It made more sense as a kid trapped in a elementary school classroom with 30 other kids; then, being forced to communicate your feelings and show a little affection and overdosing on heart candy one day out the year, it was like Mardi Gras. But the adult man-woman Valentine's ritual does not liberate; it binds, in disappointment, failure, regret.

As I walked home yesterday from work I felt good. I am a free man. Back at the job, most of the women seem unhappy. They are either alone or with someone, a husband or a lover, who is not making them happy (enough) -- as if it is their right that they be made happy by a man; as if they are little girls entitled to daddy's love and care. I felt for the people I passed by on 12th Avenue out on the town for Valentine's dates, planted on bar stools or staggering down the sidewalk drunk. All that projection, all that suffering. On the iPod Anthony Hamilton's "Charlene" synchronistically appeared:

I felt good too walking to work that morning on 12th Avenue. What brought a smile to my lips was hearing the old hippie standard "Carry On" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young:

The hippies get blamed for a lot, and rightly so -- their infantile narcissism and their poltroonish naivete -- but on the big issues -- the evils of the rat race and the primordial nature of peace and love -- they were right. The hippies' mistake was in the belief that the race to be run was a sprint. It's not. It's an ultramarathon. Change takes time and the wiliness of Odysseus.

After "Carry On" -- I'm listening to songs alphabetically now -- came Malouma's "Casablanca." I felt ecstatic:

Valentine's Night Out + Langhorne Slim + Alarm Will Sound

Let's start at the end.

Doing some warm down stretching on the front steps of my apartment building after a beautiful misty night's run, I witnessed the whole sorry spectacle of a guy picking up his Valentine for a night out. He was wearing a pair of Carhartt pants and heavy work boots that have never seen a speck of gypsum dust or any time on a road crew. As he passed me going up the steps to the front door he pulled out a phone and starting texting. He waited expectantly until one of the young women who lives in the building appeared. She was dressed in a red coat, gray wool leggings and gray knit hat. They clasped hands like middle-school lovers and refused eye contact with me as they left, but I got a decent look at the guy. He seemed in his middle to late thirties -- a good ten years older than my neighbor -- and he was suffering from male pattern baldness.

I used to see the young woman with a nice young man all the time. He was cherubic without being overly soft; seemed like a nice young guy. Well, I guess he got kicked to the curb.

I saw the young woman interact with her father one time at the mail boxes. I got the impression that she is spoiled. But she is pretty. I'm sure she will make plenty of men miserable in the years ahead.

The song I'm listening to on the iPod the whole time I'm taking in this Valentine's ritual is appropriately Langhorne Slim's "Colette":

But prior to that I was cooking up the center of a blissfully traffic free Federal Avenue when Alarm Will Sound's cover of "Cliffs Remix" by Aphex Twin appeared on the iPod. I passed a guy carrying a bag of groceries and walking his golden retriever, and I asked him, "Is that your Valentine?"

I'm a free man.