If I’m being honest, it’s hard to pin down an actual date or moment when you just “know” this relationship is different. Truth is, there are usually a number of moments that cause you to take notice and then cumulatively, one day, it all comes together and you know this is “the one.” I can’t speak for Honey and when/where/what those moments were from her perspective, but from mine, there are about ten of those moments. The day we met — I was captivated from the first look. The first date — she showed up with Kool Aid dyed purple hair, ate my ice cream cone and we watched a meteor shower, shooting stars, from the hill overlooking the place we now live. We almost kissed, but we just held hands. Even now, tears fill my eyes when I look up toward that hill and think of how that moment made me feel. The first time we were apart — I took her to breakfast at the Skyline Cafe before school that morning because she was leaving as soon as school got out. Our first New Year’s Eve together — after being apart for weeks and unable to connect with each other for hours due to being lost in Tupelo (remember there was no GPS or cell phones then). We reunited and it felt like the reviving of life in the valley of dry bones from Ezekiel. The next New Year’s Eve we got married. There are half a dozen more, but those belong to us and I’m not going to share them, but I do have one more I want to share.
I knew something had changed when we celebrated our first Valentine’s Day together. That night I cooked her a candlelight dinner, chicken parmesan with garlic bread and fettuccine Alfredo and Welch’s sparkling grape juice. In my eighteen years of life I had never cooked a meal for myself, much less anyone else, which tells you just how serious this relationship had become. In hindsight it should have been obvious, and looking back at choices my parents allowed me to make following that night, I’m pretty sure it was obvious. We weren’t just two kids dating, or children playing house, we were in the genesis of an adult love, not yet ready to bloom, but certainly planted and taking root.
Kierkegaard said life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood backwards. That's certainly true for this story. Everyone close to me knows I love to cook, but only now am I able to see the ingredients that created this culinary fascination. My love of cooking matured over time, but my desire to see that look on her face was born that night. When she saw the table and tasted the food I saw something in her I’d never seen before, in her or anyone else, and thirty years later my appetite for it remains insatiable. I don’t know what to call it or how to describe it, other than to say I think it was love. Not love for me, but feeling loved, if there's even any difference. George Strait said it best, “You look so good in love.” I’d never seen that before and I’d never experienced the way it made me feel, but I’ve been chasing it ever since.
These days I prefer to make my own red sauce and Alfredo sauce from scratch, as opposed to the jar of Ragu and Lipton pack of noodles I used in 1994. Honey is the expert in bread making so I leave that to her, but as recently as yesterday I cooked her one of her favorite dishes. I love to cook for her, placing my creations before her with the reverence and love of a sacrifice on an altar, and then I step back and watch for her reaction. It’s just a moment, a flash as quick, but also as bright, as the shooting stars we sat under that first night together, filling me with that same feeling I had when our fingers first touched and then intertwined. It’s true that a way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but that is a two way street. I learned that on our first Valentine’s Day together, and I’ve wanted every day to be Valentine’s Day for her ever since.
No comments:
Post a Comment