Valentine's Day has had a little bitter with the sweet for me, having once lost my heart to one Jenny Valentine who was a double major at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music on both the Piano and the violin. (I was in the College of Arts and Sciences but both share the same campus, dorms, and dining halls).
We made beautiful music together when she came to visit after my separation to my wife of seven years. The first time we jammed Jenny started playing "Where did our love go?" by the Supremes on the Steinway grand piano in the Ballroom of my Arts Center, a room that was uninhabited after 10PM or so when the night secretary would lock up the building. I dragged a guitar up there and played unamplified.
It was a relationship fated to fail - in part because she didn't have the temperament for the "public life" that I had to perform in my live-in Job.
My father who used to do legal work pro bono for various museums and Arts foundations suggested to me once when he visited me there:
"you could run this place. But you never will from the position you're in."
I was the superintendent of property - the "super" as they would say in a New York City building.
Jenny Valentine became disenchanted with the terrarium of my residency and shuffled back off to Buffalo to rejoin the love of her life.
I spied her many years later on the rails on the Lakeshore Limited between Buffalo and Syracuse with a little girl with a chin that looked more like the old beau's (the guy back home as they would say at Oberlin) than hers.
She avoided eye contact, and the friendly guy from San Francisco who had given me a copy of James Carville's book - "And the horse he rode in on" turned my way and told me I looked like I'd just seen a ghost. . .
Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved.
Happy Valentine's Day
Givnology Wellness Arts
May you find yourself in the world…and may you enjoy the company!