Life at 50: My Funny Valentines

Posted by Liz NuMecloseAuthor: Liz NuMe Name:
Email: nume2100@yahoo.com
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About: I’ve been married to the same man for 25 years. I have 4 grown children and, so far, 3 grandaughters. I just turned 50 this year, though I look maybe about 40. I feel about 30, and I hope that never changes.See Authors Posts (35)

Valentine’s Day is one of my favorite holidays. And being the hopeless romantic that I am, it’s not unusual for me to go to great lengths to plan out a romantic evening. But after 25 years of marriage there have been a few that didn’t turn out exactly as planned. About 20 years ago we had one that I’ll never forget.

As I always do, I started planning everything a few weeks ahead of time. Since we didn’t have much money, our date was going to be at home. The kids were going to spend the night at Grandma’s and we would have the whole house to ourselves. I planned it so that we would be having dinner, in front of the fireplace, on a blanket on the living room floor. The menu would be an array of different appetizers, accompanied by Kir Royales for our cocktails. I decided to make a compilation cassette of all the romantic music we owned. And as you can imagine, unlike how easy that is to do today, it took several days to accomplish. The day before, I went to the grocery store and bought everything we needed for a romantic evening. When Valentine’s day came I was all set. I thought it would be a perfect evening since I planned everything to perfection. But I had no idea what was to come. It was truly going to be a “Murphy’s Law” night.

Actually the evening started out nice enough. The kids, of course had been driving me crazy all day. For some reason they always did that when they knew they were going to be spending the night at Grandma’s. Maybe it was so that I would appreciate it even more once they were gone. Whatever the reason, I was definitely ready for one of those bottles of champagne to be opened as soon as hubby got home. Instead, I spent the rest of the afternoon fixing my makeup and hair to perfection, and getting into a skimpy little something I knew he would love.

When he finally arrived home from work, the house and I were all ready for a relaxing, fun, romantic evening. At first, everything went as planned. I fixed us a couple of drinks so we could recover from our busy days and refocus on our evening. Finally relaxed and ready for our date to start, I fixed us another drink, popped the cassette into the player and went in the kitchen to prepare dinner, while hubby got the fireplace going.

I had bought one of those logs that all you have to do is light the end of the bag and it would take care of the rest. Well….hubby didn’t feel that it was burning well enough or fast enough or something enough. So he decided, in his infinite wisdom, to spray some charcoal starter on the log. I had no idea what was going on in the living room because I was busy in the kitchen cooking up a storm. When all of a sudden I smell something burning. So I run into the living room and the first thing I see are flames shooting out from the fireplace. Well I have no idea how many drinks we were up to at this point. But suffice to say we were a bit more than tipsy, and I already had a bad case of the giggles. For some reason, champagne always does that to me. So through the shock, tears and laughter I tried to figure out what the hell was going on. Only to find out about my husband’s hairbrained idea. He was able to quickly put the fire out by throwing water on it. But that caused a whole new set of problems. The water caused the smoke that was already billowing out of the fireplace to increase significantly, and now the whole house was filled with thick smoke.

We quickly ran around opening all the doors and windows, not to mention froze our butts off trying to clear the air. When all of a sudden I realized that I had totally forgot about the food in the oven, which of course was burnt by now. I’m sure I would have noticed it long before, if it weren’t for the fact that the house already smelled burnt.

Fortunately the night wasn’t a total loss. Nothing in the house was damaged. And once everything settled back down, we continued on with our date. Our dinner ended up consisting of the cold appetizers I had prepared. We no longer had a fire to keep us toasty, so we had to improvise and use body heat to get ourselves and the house warmed back up. And there was still plenty of champagne to keep the laughter flowing. And best of all, a lifetime of memories of that crazy Valentine’s night.