Yes, he is Romantic!

Un-dated photo: probably mid-winter 1988

Over at Decrepit Old Fool, my husband is catching a bit of flack about his perceived lack of romantic inclinations.  While it is true that I usually don’t want him too close by while I’m viewing my romantic movie choices, I have to say that he is an old softie with what matters when it comes down to being sentimental.

Like the night of our first real and true date, where we called it a Date and didn’t have a bunch of buddies surrounding us.
I can’t recall if we went to dinner and a movie first.  I don’t think we did.  But I do remember being led into a little store on a street corner which smelled wonderful because of pipe tobacco and cigars,  and fresh ground coffee.

Over in the corner was a freezer with containers of many flavors of ice cream.  He said I should get vanilla.  So I did, on a sugar cone.  A vanilla like no other I had ever tasted before.  With little specks of real beans going through the whole scoop.
My love for Breyer’s ice cream was born.

We walked along the street, licking our ice cream cones and window shopping.  There was a furniture store, with a bedroom set-up in the front window.  I don’t remember his exact words, but they were just a little bit naughty without being downright dirty.  A promise of what might happen should we ever find ourselves together in bed.
He does know how to turn a phrase to suit the situation.

He brought his use of words into our family.  Many was the evenings when he worked a long day, yet made sure to read books to our sons.  Picture books, chapter books.  And for the times when his job schedule took him away for bedtime, he read books into a tape recorder and showed our sons how to use the machine, even with headphones.  It put a crack in my heart one evening to have one of the boys tell me that I couldn’t read the next chapter for real because they had dad on his tape.  So I sat on the floor between their beds and we all listened.  Then Lucas told me to stop the machine at the end of the chapter because that was what was fair.  Dad said a chapter a night.

One spring afternoon, we rode our bicycles to the elementary school.  I was the volunteer mom for the desk in the library, and husband was the parent monitor for the detention room.  Walking down the hall, we carried our helmets under our arms for what I thought would be a good example.

One youngster realized where we were headed, turned to his friend and said “Oh, man, I shoulda done something to get detention!”
Now, you might ask if that is what the purpose of that room was supposed to be.  The Mister, though, he never was too strict with youngsters who got out of line.  And he used his time as supervisor to teach science lessons and to have some fun.
So don’t you think I should be a bit sentimental about a guy who is so well-liked that someone else’s child was willing to get into trouble, just to have some time with this grown-up who showed a bit of respect?

You might be wondering about the picture up there at the beginning.  It doesn’t show up well, being that it is a black-and-white photo taken on a snowy night.  Here is proof positive that my husband has a mushie streak.  I can’t recall why he was out late in the snow.  Probably called out to his job.
He was gone so long that I was getting worried, thinking he had slipped on the ice and cracked open his head, and there I was with three children so I couldn’t leave them alone to go find him.

But then he came up on the back porch and blustered in through the kitchen door.  He led me down the hall to our bedroom, threw open the window and told me to look out.
I didn’t recognize a pattern at first, even though the streetlight was bright on 10 inches of fresh white snow.
So he said I should look at it better.  I saw the LOVE first, then the shape of the heart.

As if that ain’t just the most romantic thing ever.  A man who can tromp out an oversize Valentine with his heavy duty work boots.
I say he’s romantic.  And I am the one who gets to have the final judgment about it.

This picture was taken by my father-in-law on the afternoon of Husband’s college graduation in May 1982
~~love and Huggs, Diane