February 14 memories…

My wife and I will have a quiet Valentine’s evening in tonight; it’s our sixth as a couple and our third as husband and wife. Local restaurants that are normally accomodating to vegans are notably less so on big holidays like tonight’s; we’re better off curling up at home.

This afternoon it hit me with a shock that at forty, I have so few memories of being single on Valentine’s Day. This is the twenty-fourth Valentine’s Day that’s come around since I was seventeen and in my first romantic relationship — and I’ve been married or otherwise seriously partnered for twenty-one of them. By my reckoning, I spent Valentine’s Day alone in 1987, 1993, and 1998, and was with a partner of one kind or another for all the others. In ’87, I went hiking with single friends on the Marin Headlands; in ’93 I spent hours and hours exercising in the gym; in ’98, I worked on my dissertation and drank too much.

Oddly, I have a hard time remembering what I did with ex-wives or lovers on Valentine’s days past. Restaurants and florists all blur together after a while! What comes to my mind tonight, as I wait for my wife to get home from work, are the last five February 14ths we’ve spent together. (We were in Paris last year, and it’ll be hard to top that again.)

But I also remember that hike in 1987. We were a mixed group of boys and girls, all frosh or sophomores at Cal; we were all single and to varying degrees, unhappy about it. We spent the day on BART and on buses, hiking and laughing and singing the Cal fight song from a bluff overlooking the San Francisco Bay. We bought wine with a fake ID on the way home, and walked back to our co-ops and apartments arm-in-arm, locked together in that sweet sentimental solidarity of singleness and late adolescence, none of us wanting to let go…

Next to these past five years, it’s my favorite Valentine’s memory.