Real for Valentine's Day

I was thinking about the "V" of Valentine's when I remembered Margery Williams wonderful little book The Velveteen Rabbit. Here's how that rabbit learned about LOVE from the Skin Horse in the nursery:

The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hair in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those play-things that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

I married Mr. Fun a long time ago. He was 19 and I was 15. Today I thought about how we've both become real. It's been a lot of hard work and it hasn't always been fun. But I think now, after many years together, we're REAL. So I suppose that means we're loose in the joints, very shabby, have little hair, and our eyes are gone. Hum!


Today, Valentine's Day, has been a great, casual, comfortable, nice day. Mr. Fun snuck out of the house early (he had an errand to run) and came home with a half-dozen red roses and a heart-shaped balloon with the words "I Love You" on it. Before he left the house, though, he stopped by my laptop and made a Valentine. He knew the first place I'd go after waking-up. There on the screen he had left a little rhyming poem with two Valentine pictures pasted in.

I had purchased a fabulous card for him, found it at Hallmark (where else?) and it says exactly what I have told him dozens of times -- "I could say I got really lucky when I got you for a husband. But the truth is, I think God had us picked out for each other from the very beginning. (Then inside the card it says) And that makes me more than lucky. That makes me blessed. Happy Valentine's Day. I like that a lot.

Then the bonus came when I located a card I have sent to him four times previous to today. On the cover is a young couple sitting on a street curb and they are all tangled in each others arms "making-out." (Maybe you can see it in my blip.) The inside of the card says, "In public, in private, I just pretty much want you." That card was a keeper. So every few years I mail it to him again. I even mailed it once from Chattanooga, Tennessee, when I went to a conference without him. It is a well traveled card.

Well, I hope you've had a lovely extraordinary fabulous Valentine's Day wherever you are. Good night from Southern California.

Rosie (& Mr. Fun), aka Carol