Dick Summer Connection

I like Valentine’s Day. You get to tell somebody “I love you.”… it happens at the beginning of baseball’s Spring Training… and it’s not very expensive.

There’s a history to Valentine’s Day. Seems there was a priest named Valentinus who lost his head courtesy of Claudius the Cruel on February 14 in the year 269 A.D. Supposedly Father V. healed his jailer’s blind daughter, fell in love with her, and left a note for her in his cell the night before his execution, saying, “I love you…from your Valentine.”
 

Holy people’s involvement with romance continues to this day. “Christian” web sites now sell Valentine’s Day cards from GOD! Seems to me that’s unfair competition for a mortal Louie-Louie Generation guy.
There’s now a competing “Day.” It’s called “Singles Awareness Day,” SAD for short. So “Happy S.A.D. Day” for people who don’t get a Valentine’s Day kiss…or at least a card.

But I must confess, I think S.A.D. is sad. Men and women belong together. There are some exceptions, of course, and God bless them too. Let’s just say lovers belong together.

Here’s my problem. I took a Valentine’s Day Poll. And the results were a real shocker to me. More than 90 percent of the people I asked…of both sexes…just kinda blew Cupid off…and I don’t mean that as a pun. “Oh…was that Valentine’s Day?” was by far the most common answer. What a shame.

That little guy’s arrows can be weapons of mass destruction. You’ve got to have guts to stand up to Cupid’s arrows. You sure can get hurt. Something very powerful inside you has to say…”he/she is worth taking this very big risk.”

You’ve got to be ready to blow up your life for somebody. That’s the difference between a relationship and a romance. A relationship develops.  A romance explodes. Businesses have relationships. Lovers have romances.
I think in everybody’s life, there is…or was…or will be…some…”Wild Thing who makes your heart sing”…as the Troggs used to say.
 

Sometimes there’s only one “Wild Thing” lover in what’s left of a romance. That hurts. But sometimes…there’s still powerful magic in the memories.
 

But…according to my poll…an awful lot of people…even ones in “good relationships”… have “Lost That Lovin’ Feeling”…that “Wild Thing” song inside. That’s a big loss. A terrible quiet. A deadly power failure.
Speaking of old songs, one of my favorites is called “My Funny Valentine.” Appropriately, the lyric was written by a guy named Lorenz Hart. Mr. Hart had a pretty good understanding of the fact that love can be an exploding cigar… but it lights up our lives anyway. He says, “My funny Valentine, sweet comic valentine, you make me smile with my heart.”
 

Know why some guys try to be a funny Valentine ? Two reasons: 1- It gives you bragging rights if you can be funnier than the other guy. 2- Laughs turn a girl on. Robin Williams could have so much sex he would be seriously injured by the friction. It figures. Sex is a funny looking thing. Laughs make things sexy. Which is exactly why Sister Mary Attila’s sternest command at St. Gregory’s all those years ago was…”NO LAUGHING.” She was Brooklyn’s first line of defense against sex.
 

“Your looks are laughable, un-photographical, yet you’re my favorite work of art,” says Mr. Heart’s song.
Somebody once said that “If a woman lets a man look directly into her eyes for two whole minutes, she’ll be in his bed in an hour.” Eyes can be very sexy. My Lady Wonder Wench sometimes gives me a look that you could pour on a waffle. That shouldn’t be a surprise, because “erogenous zones” are either everywhere or they’re nowhere. And never forget the power of aural sex. Aural…words. (I’m told the other kind is good, too.) That’s not to say there isn’t a wee beastie about sex. If smarts, laughs and charm were all that’s going on between men and women, every guy in town would be chasing Barbara Walters.
 

 “Is your figure less than Greek, is your mouth a little weak, when you open it to speak, are you smart ?”…the song asks. I always liked smart girls. Except for Jeannie Campbell. I didn’t know if she was smart or not, and I really didn’t care. She was 5 and I was 6. She was struggling to learn which way the hat goes on the number 7. I knew that, but at that time I had no idea why it was so nice teaching her. I found out later, when I took her to my first high school dance. What a difference ten years made. I often wonder what ever happened to Jeannie. The way the Internet goes, maybe she’s reading this right now. Hey, Jeannie, drop a note to dick@dicksummer.com . It would be fun to see you again. Neither one of us understood…but you were my first love.
 

I just heard about a guy’s last love. It grabbed me by the throat.  I’m shaky on the details, because it went by so fast that I didn’t have time to take notes. It was on the BBC channel… and it was about a guy in Africa….it might have been Darfur. It seems a bunch of bad guys attacked a village and killed everybody there…except for one man. This guy had run off and made a successful escape…but his wife tripped and fell while they were running away…and she was killed…and he went back…he couldn’t leave her.  That confused the bad guys so much that they spared him. They figured he must be some kind of holy man. They couldn’t believe it. He had it made. They had no idea why he’d go back to face his own certain death. They couldn’t understand that he just loved her…he wanted to hold her in his arms just one last time…he needed to cry more than he needed to live…he simply didn’t care about living without her. Come to think about it, maybe that’s the most important part of what “holy” is all about
 

Dick’s Details Quiz – All the answers are in the current podcast on the website. ( www.dicksummer.com )
 

1- What’s the fastest way to catch a warm ?
2- Why do some Americans have very large mouths ?
3- How come some of us are called Fat Heads ?
 

Scoring:
3 right – Two dozen Valentine’s Day roses.
2 right – A big Valentine’s day box of candy.
1 right- One grungy looking jelly bean.
0 right – Tickets to a Julio Iglesias concert.
 

I’m looking at my Lady Wonder Wench…sitting on the couch across from me now…doing her needlepoint…concentrating so hard, she’s sticking her tongue out, and blowing her hair out of her eyes…and I understand why I’ve always liked Valentine’s day. It’s in the last line of Mr. Heart’s song.“Don’t change a hair for me, not if you care for me. You make each day my Valentine’s day.”
 

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 8th, 2009 at 12:30 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.