Love All-ways
Happy day of the heart, if you like to say Happy Valentine’s Day. I have always been lucky in love, not romantically speaking, but at least as far as my family was concerned. There has always been an abundance of love in my life. This year my sister sent me one of the best Valentine’s Day cards and for the past few weeks I have been thinking of what up until now has stood out in my memory as the best Valentine’s gift of my life. The two seem to mirror each other in a way and it seems fitting, as they would each involve my parents who are at the very epicenter of my love.
Up until this year, the best Valentine’s Day gift of my life came when I was a very young girl from my father. It was when I was probably 3 or 4 and when we still had no car in our family. We were poor; we took the bus, walked, and rode bikes a lot. It didn’t stop my parents or any of the extended family from loving me an awful lot. This particular Valentine’s Day my father was working downtown with refugees from Southeast Asia or the elderly and disenfranchised; it all seems to meld into one pot in my memory. My father called my mom and me and said a gift was on its way. Out we went to wait for a mysterious delivery; I wore silver high heels and most likely a party dress (that was back in the days when I refused to wear pants of any kind). I remember happily hopping up and down our steps; singing or humming to myself, anticipation and the joy it brings simmering in my stomach and heart. We waited, we sat, time passed and then a lone yellow taxi drove down our street. We never took taxis in those days, they were too pricey and something I noticed only in my periphery. But then the lone taxi with no one in the back seat slowed down in front of us and then came to a stop. The driver rolled down his window and shouted out “are one of you Ramona or Barbara?” “Yes, yes, yes,” I yelled, “that’s me!” A driver who in my memory could have been a longshoreman labored to get out of the taxi and walked around to open the back door. There in the empty back seat was a boxed up cake with a note that said “Happy Valentine’s Day! I Love You, Pops”. My father had sent us a cake in a taxi; he paid money we never spent on ourselves to send a cake to my mom and me. I felt my heart rise right out of me that day and float like a helium balloon into the sky. The cake I don’t remember much but the taxi and what it symbolized to a young child made an indelible mark.
I have remembered this memory every year in February, I have always held it up as the very example of love, never has it been met in equal parts until this year. Just a few days ago my sister sent me a card, a simple note on stationary but inside was a drawing of a purple heart and a handmade card from a long time ago. My sister is going through some of my mother’s belongings and she came across a valentine my mother gave me 30 odd years ago, perhaps the same year as the cake or the year after. My mother kept it in a box all this time and my sister found it last month and sent it to me just the other day. Somehow a lifetime later and in my mother’s absence a purple water color kept pristine all of these years did the same thing to me as the cake in the back of a taxi, it made my heart balloon open and soar up to the sky.
So whatever you do this Valentine’s Day (or if you choose to do nothing at all) I hope you remember there is a big purple heart for you out there. There is love in our lives every day. It may not look how we imagine it but it is there and sometimes it’s drawn in water color and kept in a box until just the time you need it most.
Love,
Ra
