The Full Suburban: Love is in the words, even when they’re courtesy of a stranger
This is a public service announcement for anyone who is unaware: VALENTINE’S DAY IS TOMORROW. I repeat, Valentine’s Day is tomorrow. Grab your boxes of chocolate and diamond-ring-stuffed teddy bears and get in your places, people. This is not a drill.
I know what you might be thinking: Valentine’s Day is a manufactured holiday, invented by greeting card companies and chocolate cartels to whip all of us suckers into a frenzy and get us to buy their products. While all of that may be true, I am not going to pooh-pooh a holiday that promotes pink decor and the over-consumption of candy. Valentine’s Day is almost on par with Christmas if you ask me!
I am personally not the most romantic person in the world, so I don’t have any great gifts to give Logan on the big day. The most I’ll do is prepare a semi-fancy dinner and maybe cut some brownies into heart shapes for dessert. And I don’t know, maybe I’ll get him some new floor mats for his car or something.
Logan, on the other hand, is a romantic genius. I’ve told him over and over that he should teach a master class on how to be a thoughtful husband. Logan sends me flowers on our anniversary, my birthday, and sometimes just because. He makes a book for me every Christmas with all of my columns from that year. He watches rom-coms without complaint, lets me eat the last slice of pie, and has agreed to be the one to clean the shower until the day we die. He’s a rare gem.
But it was the gift he gave me out of the blue a few weeks ago that really melted my heart. It arrived in our mailbox after a busy afternoon of picking up kids and breaking up fights, and I was feeling pretty done with the whole day. Logan had just returned from three days at a dental meeting of some-kind-or-the-other in Arizona, so my curiosity was piqued when I found in the stack of mail an envelope addressed to me with an Arizona return address.
As soon as I got into the house, I opened the envelope and found note: “Dearest Julia, an original curated poem has been gifted to you by Logan. Your typewriter poet, Fadi.” Behind it was a type-written poem.
“For the one and only Julia,” it read in part. “You are the grace of all never random ink, the beautiful spaces between words. Six shooting stars sing your lullaby and one mountain knows your exhale. A bloom of nurture selfless, crafting a soulbliss smile upon hearts that matter.”
I loved it. When Logan got home from work later that night, I told him that I had received the poem.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, a little embarrassed. “When I was in Arizona, we went out to eat at this little restaurant, and a guy named Fadi had set up a desk in the corner with a typewriter and a sign advertising custom poems.”
“I love that so much,” I said. “It’s so quirky and old school.”
“I knew you would love it,” Logan responded. “I went over to him and he asked me a few questions about you, and by the time I was done with dinner, he handed me this poem.”
Now, listen: I really love the poem. I have it framed and sitting on my office desk, where I see it a hundred times a day. But what I love even more is the fact that Logan knows me so well that he could predict that my heart would go all aflutter because of a poem written by a bearded stranger using a vintage typewriter in some random cafe in Arizona. It’s a small thing, but sometimes the small things speak the loudest (ask any parent of a toddler).
American theologian Timothy Keller said it this way: “To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is … what we need more than anything.”
“Fully known and truly loved” – we’re still working on it. Neither of us is perfect. But like Fadi wrote toward the end of my poem, we are “slaying dragons with (our) vow.”
Sounds just right for Valentine’s Day.
Julia Ditto shares her life with her husband, six children and a random menagerie of farm animals in Spokane Valley. She can be reached at dittojulia@gmail.com.