I wrote another note re roses last night, while giving my hands a rest from knitting and being too wired from all the Scharffenberger chocolate to sleep:
When I was in college, I was dating an older fellow with whom I was supremely incompatible but whom I was, for awhile, in love with, and who very much wanted to settle down and marry me. Meantime, my old friend Richard, whom I’d known since I was a week old, was off to France on a mission for the Mormon Church.
Come summertime, his two years being up, Richard came home. There was a large party held for the twenty-something young adults in the area, and we all came. So it was that I ran into my old high-school buddy–we’d never dated, we’d been good friends, more akin to siblings than anything else–and I took one look at the guy I’d been dating right there, and I simply knew that that was that. He just didn’t measure up. It was over. It didn’t occur to me that I’d someday get to marry Richard, just, I knew I had to marry someone as good as him.
It wasn’t too long after that that Richard asked me out on our first actual date. It felt so much better being with him than George: with Richard, I wasn’t careening from wild highs to low lows, I was simply home. Eventually, he proposed; it felt so wonderful to say yes.
Word got out–I don’t know how, ’twasn’t me–to the first guy that I was engaged. He showed up at my doorstep. With (oh goodness) a dozen red roses, supposedly as a congratulations on my happiness. Can you say awkward!? Mercifully, he simply left quickly after thrusting them into my stunned hands at my door.
Richard showed up less than an hour later. I was living in an apartment with three other single women; he looked from the doorway to the kitchen table, and asked, curious, whose roses those were?
“Mine…” I was beyond chagrinned.
“Who gave them to you?” It certainly made no sense to him. It made no sense to me either!
(Oh man what do I do with this!?) “George…”
“‘Scuse me a moment.” And with that, he spun on his heels and disappeared. I had no idea what he was going to do nor what to say. He reappeared not too long after, with One. Single. Rose. The very longest long-stemmed red rose I had ever laid eyes on in my life. It was big, and it was in direct contrast to the bunch that had so many littler ones crammed together into that vase, a crowd noisily vying for attention all at once. Richard’s single rose had presence, it had self-confidence, and it was from the man who knew he had my full heart.
So I occasionally razz him gently about the big bunches of red roses at Valentine’s; one will always do it, for me.
But I’ve also learned, however he wants to celebrate it, let him do it his way. He knows what he’s doing. He always has.