A Day for Different Conversations

 I know, everyone is talking about the impeachment trial, variously celebrating or decrying the outcome.  Fine.  It’s not an unimportant conversation, simply secondary.  While the ex-President wasn’t convicted of treason, he was unarguably convicted of being despicable – a disgraceful leader, an affront to all that is decent, and an international embarrassment.  But I don’t suppose we needed a trial to establish that.  We knew it already.

 

So, why waste my time mired in such nonsense?  It’s Valentine’s Day, after all, and politics and the current dystopian embodiment notwithstanding, I have plenty of reasons to celebrate Love.  Yes, Love.  Capital “L.”  It is a worthy alternative concentration.  I am, when I survey my personal landscape, surrounded and routinely animated by dear and warming friends who beckon, without even knowing it, the brighter lights of my imagination.  I am cradled by a son and daughter and their significant others who augment my soul with a fresh sense of both roots and wings; with parents who continually excavate the best in me and nudge me toward more; and extended family who, like the flying buttresses of gothic cathedrals, steady and inform and expand me, reinforcing my flightier fancies.

 

All that, plus I get to spend my life with Lori Jo Alexander Diebel.   That, as I have spent the past 25 years or so discovering, is a far more wonderful topic still.  Where do I begin?  

 

On the day that I proposed, I picked up my guitar (it’s a sickness, I know.  On my gravestone will likely be carved the epitaph, “There’s a song for that.”) and sang a song.  It was a song by David Wilcox called, “Kindness,” which, though it might not sound like the most romantic tune of the ages, perfectly characterized my hoped-for bride – then, as now.  Kindness certainly doesn’t exhaust my beloved’s virtues – the list, in truth, is inexhaustible – but it is, indeed, up there at the top.  Beauty, welcome, joy, and yes, kindness.  And encouragement; how could I forget that?  Those, of course, and indulgent support.  This, from a guy who prematurely quit his job to uproot our whole marital enterprise in order to move the two of us to the country to completely start over as cultivators of the seeds, stewards of the soil, and fomenters of a fresh imagination.  She didn’t sign on for this – or, for that matter, the chickens, or the coming bees that eventually went along with it – but here we are…with her blessing, her support, and her immersion.  

 

All that, and she still makes me weak in the knees.  Well into our 24^th matrimonial year, I still feel the flutter.  It is a major part of my life’s ambition to give her reason to feel it, too. 

 

More than a distraction from troublesome current events, you are my current event, this day and always.  Happy Valentine’s Day, Lori Jo.  As the old classic sings it, dear Valentine, in your company and your embrace, “each day is Valentine’s Day.”  I’m forever grateful for the mythical arrow that has pierced my heart, and by the piercing makes me, if not exactly whole, at least yours. 

 

And that is quite enough.