My antipathy has nothing to do with St. Valentine, whoever he actually was; he’s never done me any harm.  I’m sure he was a truly decent fellow.  It’s nothing to do with chocolatiers, whom I admire and occasionally support, though chocolate is not my personal food-based vice (my wife is another story), or florists, although I’m not a fan of cut flowers, beautiful as they are.  I don’t even really blame Hallmark and other card manufacturers, who are just trying to make a living, and good for them in getting a holiday that is essentially an excuse to hawk their extensive wares.

It’s about Cupid.  Rhymes with stupid.

Cupid qua Cupid is one of the only visual modern holdovers from Greco-Roman mythology.  He’s been pudgified and cuted-up to make him more marketable, and that’s not particularly offensive to me; after all, the same thing happened to St. Nicholas, and we survived it.  It’s more the arrows Cupid is alleged to be firing off.  Think about this metaphor for a second.  There’s this winged sprite flitting about and firing love-shafts into the hearts of unsuspecting men and women, who then fall deeply and hopelessly in love with whomever’s name is on the arrow (or whomever the victim sees next, depending on your brand of mythology).  And therein lies my particular problem.

It is absolutely not required that you fall in love with anyone.  Not.  Required.  It is possible to resist ANY person.  There is no Cupid firing off arrows.  Pop culture says that love strikes you…well, like an arrow, and you’re helpless before it. You’re walking down the street, and blam, there’s the love of your life, and before you can say “this is really, really unwise”, you’re gazing deeply into each other’s eyes and cooing softly.  Nothing you can do about it.  The only way to resist this is to have already been struck by the love arrow and miraculously still be in love with that person, and then you might have a defense, if you’re lucky.

Gigantic festering enormous steaming pile of fresh horse dung.

I go to conferences a lot.  These are gatherings of men and women, who are away from their normal circumstances and frequently lacking spouses and significant others and the natural oversight those bring.  Many of the men and almost all of the women are attractive.  Liaisons are formed.  But not by everyone.  A friend of mine called it “being out there”, and some people are, and some are not.  If you’re “out there”, then Cupid’s shaft can strike you.  If you’re not, then it can’t.  And contrary to popular culture and current social understandings, you do not have to be out there.  You do not have to even allow the possibility of “falling in love”.  There are those that are absolutely proof against all of Cupid’s arrows.

This is not to say that they have to deny the attractiveness of another person, much less that they run in fear of them.  I do some acting, and I’m on stage with some really brilliant and attractive women, some of whom I’m sure I could love if I wanted to.  “Falling in love” is terribly easy.  Falling out of love, unfortunately, is even easier, and my experience is that one leads to the other rather more often than not.

But why not just go for it?  Falling in love “feels <bleeping> great”, as Barbara Streisand said in the badly underrated The Mirror Has Two Faces.  Well, yes, it does.  To the ones falling.  Assuming that the ones falling have no attachments whatever and have made no promises to anyone, then there’s no objection.  But if they have, and so often they have, then to the assorted casualties of the fall, it feels like what it actually is, which is a betrayal of commitment and abandonment of honor.  It’s like a stab in the guts.  But if you give any credence to the stupid of Cupid, then what else is it but inevitable?  You have no choice, right?

Divorce courts are full of people who just “fell out of love with each other.”  This is about the stupidest thing I can imagine.  Love is not a little fuzzy creature that gets created when two people get together, and if it gets neglected, then it dies.  Sounds a little silly, doesn’t it?  But look at the headlines: Miami Herald: Valentine’s advice for keeping love alive; Huffington Post: 10 Tips to Make Love Last; San Francisco Chronicle: How to Keep Love Alive This Valentine’s Day for New Parents, and I could go on.  You keep a thing alive.  A fish, or a dog, a bushy hydrangea.  Cupid, and by extension Valentine’s Day, makes love a thing.  It’s a noun.  But lasting love is not a noun.

Love is a verb.  I love my wife.  What that means is not that my wife and I have created a furry heart that we keep in the closet and let out for air every February 14.  I LOVE her, meaning that I do things every day for her to care for her and tend to her needs.  Put another way, I choose her.  I choose her in every thing I do.  I am not “out there”.  No Cupid’s dart can strike me.  Love is not something that pierces you or that you fall into like giant vat of pudding.  Love is something you DO.  You don’t love people you don’t do things for.  You might care about them.  You might wish them the best.  But to LOVE them requires that you do something.

I realize that this flips the entire Valentine’s thing on its head in a way (though some of you are saying – see, I bought candy, so I did something – well, okay, but do it again next week any you’re on to something).  And I realize that it makes a lot of movies not work so well any more, and reduces to ridiculousness most pop ballads.  Fine by me.  The great love stories, like the one in Casablanca, for instance, often involve the lovers choosing to NOT be together.  But that’s just it; it’s a choice.  I am not so smitten with love for my wife that I think her the most beautiful woman in the world.  Nor, I am well aware, is my wife so smitten with love for me that she thinks me the handsomest man.  We both of us are aware of each other’s faults and quirks and allergies.  Our love is not built on some fantasy, or on sexual attraction, powerful but as fleeting as the dew on a sunny morning.

We’ve been married 20 years.  We have eight children.  We’re getting older.  Our love didn’t survive that, our love is that.  And we love each other more than we ever did, because we’re better at it than we ever were.  Our love is built on a choice.  That choice was made 20+ years ago, and it encompassed every possible eventuality, from mental illness to old age to bankruptcy to injury to scarring to you-name-whatever-you-like.  I didn’t fall in love with my wife.  I chose to love her.  And I choose her still, every day, and more every day.

So do not be my Valentine, my dearest, dearest love.  Be my Jeanette.  Be mine, as I am yours, forever and ever.

I reached the office and sat for a moment and thought about that.  It’s a tradition we;ve established.  My wife does it and I do it, every time, without fail.  We never leave without taking a moment for each other.

Everyone tries to avoid thinking about the terrible things that can happen.  Most of the time, because they don’t happen all that often, we succeed.  We can get complacent.  We can get sloppy.  This is the sure path to regret.

I kiss my wife goodbye every time I leave, and I do it because one time it will be the last time.  Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day, one day it will.  One day I will kiss her goodbye, and it will be Goodbye.  I doubt very much that I will get advance warning.

There’s an apocryphal but wonderful story of Martin Luther.  He was out in a yard, working, when one of his parishioners came by and saw him with his hands in the dirt.  Indignantly, the parishioner said, “Martin, what are you doing?  If you knew that Christ would come tomorrow, what would you be doing right now?”  And Luther looked up at the parishioner and said, “I’d be planting this tree.”

Always be doing what you would be doing.  One time, it will be the last time.  Leave with no regrets.

What is it about birthdays that we love?  Sunday is the birthday of the country I love best.  We celebrate this birthday with fireworks and barbecues and sixteen straight hours of World War II movies.  The biggest holiday of the year is the celebration of the birthday of Jesus Christ.  We have Washington’s birthday, and Martin Luther King’s birthday, and a dozen others.  We all remember the birthday of our marriages (we call them anniversaries, but they’re birthdays sure enough).  I remember every year the birthday of my career in lending in Utah (it’s the end of October).  We, as humans, love birthdays every bit as much as Thanner does.

Today is my forty-second birthday.  It certainly seems magical to me.  I have had already birthday greetings from a one-time prom date that I haven’t seen in many years (hi, Yvette!), from a kindred spirit that I met in Rome 25 years ago (Leslie, God bless you), and from an old girlfriend that now lives with her family in Australia (Jillyn, my dear friend).  And dozens of others.  I slept wonderfully last night for the first time in a good while.  I went to the gym this morning and I’ve lost weight again.  This morning my son Nicholas starts for the first time at point guard for his high school team.  The sun is shining, and the garden looks great.  My wife still loves me.

Many of those things were or have been true for a while, so perhaps it’s just that I’m noticing them more today.  But I am noticing them, and that’s part of the magic of the day for me.

For Thanner, I think part of the day’s magic – perhaps, in fairness, most of the magic – is the presents.  That faded for me a long time ago.  I can’t even tell my long-suffering wife what I’d like to eat for my birthday dinner.  It’s just not very important to me.  But there are birthday things that are important to me.  I like to know that I’m a better person than I was a year ago.  I like to rededicate myself to improving, to becoming better yet.  Birthdays are very good for that.  That’s a gift I give, not that I get, but I’ve noticed that I look forward far more to giving than to getting, anyway.

Every day I get the gift of a new life.  As a Christian, and a sinner (aren’t we all?), I make mistakes every day, and every day I need the grace of Jesus Christ to reach into the broken places in my soul and put things to rights.  I need Him to make things right for others when I hurt them.  He always does.  This is called, in Christian parlance, being “born again”.  So in that sense, every day is my birthday.  Every day is a new chance to be what I really want to be, what I am meant to be.

In the spirit of that, I am going to commit the gaucherie of asking for gifts today.  What I want is this: do something, no matter how small, to move forward one of those I-always-wanted-to’s that you have stored up.  You know the ones I mean.  “I’ve always wanted to write a novel” or “I’ve always wanted to go skydiving” or “I’ve always wanted to see a Broadway show.”  Whatever it is, do something to make it happen.  That’s what I want.  If you’d like to come back here and tell me what it was that you did, that would be great, but it isn’t critical.  Just do it.  Go the whole day without snapping at anyone.  Be cheerful in the face of certain disaster.  Become just a little bit more of the person you know you were meant to be.  Be born again yourself.

Let the magic begin!  Happy birthday to all of us!

There is beauty in bricklaying. In taking an idea or a problem and laying out all of its pieces and parts, mapping out a solution, and putting it in place, piece by piece. I’d actually be willing to bet that those of us that spend a lot of time bricklaying actually relish the hands-on part of the work, the tangible results that we can see and feel.

But I think the breakdown happens because of our tendencies to put everyone’s responsibilities in a hierarchy instead of a web. Instead of looking at the symbiotic nature of different roles, we’re compelled to rank them in order of imaginary or perceived importance, putting ideas above execution. Visionaries above builders. But is that really the right way to look at things?

We bricklayers depend on the idea people for the inspiration. The visionaries need the architects and the builders to realize their ideas. But perhaps we’re doing a crummy job of letting the bricklayers see and feel the true impact of their efforts. We’re not communicating well enough that their role is mission critical, and as important as the idea generation itself.

Is that it? Why do we all want to be the ones with the big ideas, and why do we somehow think the execution work is less important?

As a card-carrying member of the visionary class, let me say that first, in a small business, one has to learn to do all three tasks well, or one starves.  But second, and paradoxically, the MOST successful businessmen I know delegate almost everything except vision to other people.  I don’t know how to balance that.  If I spend all my time envisioning what our business could look like and be, then I don’t sell any money, and if I don’t sell any money, we don’t eat well.  Contrariwise, as the Cheshire Cat would say, I recognize that I don’t lay bricks well, and I am at best very average at architecting, and there are a lot of people, even people that are right here in the Group, that surpass me every which way at both.

But it’s my name on the door.  That seems wrong, somehow.

Here’s a dirty secret from the “Eyes Only” files of the Dreamer Class: most of us envy the bricklayers at least part of the time.  We envy those that can doggedly pursue a course, a bit at a time, because we know that that is the only way anything of lasting value was ever accomplished.  We know that is how food is grown, babies gestated, buildings built.  We know that we are Ozymandias.

As Ms. Naslund says, we are usually the ones that get the book deals, the ones with our names on airports, the ones that appear on the cover of Inc.  I’m not sure why that is.  But I do know this: one of the reasons I have a family, one of the reasons I have SUCH a family, one of the reasons I have a garden that is larger than my first house, and five fruit trees, and six grape canes and chickens and cats and the whole shooting match is that these things remind me that without the bricklayers – without my willingness to become a bricklayer myself – I will never acheive anything worth remembering.

Bricklayers amaze me.  I married one.  And what she has built dwarfs everything I will ever do.

Back to work.