Expectations may race, but hearts go at own pace

When I was born in ‘66, my schoolteacher mom and bookbinder dad took me home to our fifth-floor apartment in the Frederiksberg neighborhood of Copenhagen, Denmark.

The apartment was in a six-story, rather stately, red brick apartment building on Julius Valentiners Vej.

You’d think, perhaps, starting your life on a street with “valentine” in its name would bring some sort of good love karma, but my parents divorced before I made it to first grade – and many years later, I divorced, too.

I don’t know much about Julius except that he was a real person who lived in Copenhagen and never achieved sainthood. I googled him just the other day and found that his dad owned a factory in the mid-1800s, and that was about it.

It’s Valentine’s Day today. I’m sorry if that comes as a surprise and you have to stop reading and sprint to the store for flowers or chocolate or cupcakes, or, or, or something.

When I was new to this country back in ‘91, I had no concept of Valentine’s Day. Today, the holiday has infected Denmark, undoubtedly stimulated by American movies and international shopping gurus.

But in February of ‘92, I was pretty surprised when I watched for the first time as the nation went into pink Valentine’s Day convulsions. I was also completely intimidated.

People, you have a lot riding on this holiday.

Listen carefully – that shattering noise you hear is the sound of hearts breaking, unfulfilled expectations crashing to the ground, and the collective biting of nails among those who don’t think they’ll even get a valentine today.

Or whose bouquet of flowers isn’t as big as their cubicle mate’s.

Or whose box of chocolates isn’t handmade and Peruvian and organic. Oh boy, the pressure has been building since Christmas.

If you believe the TV commercials, today is the day your love commitment takes the WASL – so I hope you studied hard.

If not, your lack of attention will be reflected in your grade.

Without going entirely too tabloid, my own love life currently resembles one of those EPA designated brownfields: contaminated by industrial-strength waste and complex hydrocarbons, leaving me wondering whether it’s worth it to do cleanup and rehabilitation. Perhaps I should just pave over the mess and convert it to a surface parking lot.

Or I could have it encapsulated in glass and hauled off to a nuclear waste facility.

What do you mean I’m bitter?

I’m not. There is love in my life, especially as long as I buy the right kind of cat food.

Just because no one ever carved my (conveniently short) name in a wheat field using his combine, or dropped a diamond big enough to choke a horse into my gin and tonic, I don’t feel slighted.

I’ve absolutely had my fair share of appropriately Americanized Valentine’s Day attention over the years, and of course I’ve loved every bit of it.

The thing is, to me, romance of the kind that endures is about much smaller, everyday things than combines and diamonds and dozens of roses.

It’s about finding the right amount of milk in my coffee, or my favorite dinner already cooking when I come home. It’s about finding my old car newly washed, vacuumed and with all fluid levels at “full” on a dreary Monday morning. Romance is about flowers for no reason, on a Wednesday that’s nothing special. And it’s about me doing exactly the same for someone I care about, regardless of what date it is.