The Romantic.com

Romantic Rituals

44 AND COUNTING

submitted by: Michael Holland Myers

 

I met my dream girl in 1994.  I was just going through a divorce, and she was just out of a relationship.  We dated for 3 months and she could see I was falling for her, so she ended the relationship, saying that we were both not in a good place to get serious.  And that if it was meant to be, we would meet again.  So I sent an occasional Christmas card, and I would get a very non-committal friendly card in return.  However, my Christmas 1997 card got a very encouraging card in return.

We talked on the phone a few times, and decided on a dinner date to meet and catch up.  Due to the holidays, and the subsequent Valentine’s Day, we didn’t meet until February 21, 1998.  In the three years since we last dated, I thought I might have made my memory of her “bigger than life”, and that in reality no one could have been as wonderful as I remembered her.  I was wrong.  When we met again, she was even more wonderful, more beautiful, and I felt that we picked up right where we had left off three years before.

So I decided to commemorate that wonderful day, the 21st, with some act of love every month.  So every 21st of the month, I go to her work with a present, and with some food item for her coworkers.

Once it was a Barbershop Quartet.  Once it was a star being named after her.  It has been a decorative flag from her alma mater (Cal Berkeley), a 10 foot by 20 foot sign on sprinkler pipe put up in the parking lot, a bouquet of candy bars, a bouquet of teddy bears, a box of refrigerator magnets with loving words to make sentences (that I made myself).  I learned how to make Double Chocolate Walnut Biscotti, bundt cakes, cupcakes, layer cakes, candy.  I picked through dozens of M&Ms so that I could bring only the orange and brown ones for Halloween and Thanksgiving, and bring the red and green at Christmas, and bring the blue and gold for Cal game day (Cal’s colors).

I haven’t missed a month since March 1998.  I am coming up on my 44th visit now.  We were married on August 11, 2001.  We came back from the honeymoon on the 19th.  I still made it to her office on the 21st.  (I already had it planned).  At the wedding, the priest said that he hopes I continue this ritual, even though it will get pretty expensive.  Well, I just think about how expensive it would be to my heart if I ever stop.  I can always make more money, but I can’t make more time to tell her I love her.