Valentine's (yester)Day
I wanted to do three things for my wife for Valentine's Day:
- Make her a special dinner of homemade cheese and meat ravioli.
- Give her a small but meaningful gift.
- Dance with her in our living room to romantic music and candlelight.
Mrs. Happy loves ravioli, but it's really too labor-intensive to make from scratch. That's why my dinner was going to be so special. However, I just happened to find an incredibly simple recipe for ravioli the other day (in the fantastic How to Cook Without a Book). Instead of explaining how to make the pasta containers, it called for using wonton wrappers. If you buy wonton wrappers you can skip the messy parts of mixing of the dough, rolling it out into an uneven sheet, and cutting it into pieces that never quite match each other. Wonton wrappers stay moist in their packaging, are perfectly textured and uniformly cut, and cook beautifully "sturdy yet sheer, revealing the filling within.…earthy yet ethereal, substantial yet tender," according to my cookbook.
So yesterday during my lunch break I went to the grocery store to buy all the necessary supplies. The store had no wonton wrappers. So I went to another store. Again, no wonton wrappers. I struck out at a third store and had to return to work no better off than I was before. After work, I visited three more grocery stores to no avail. I asked employees at every store where they kept the wonton wrappers. Half of them had no idea what I was talking about. "Soup is on aisle 12," is the most intelligent response I got out of that bunch. The other half went out of their way to help me look, and for that I am grateful, but the end result is that my dinner plans came to nothing.
For the gift, I intended to get a little something that would help my wife in her newest hobby: playing the drums. She has been getting informal lessons from a couple of drummers she knows, and she practices at home by banging pens on books and tables while stomping on the floor to simulate beating a bass drum. So I wanted to get her a little machine of some kind that she could bang on that would reproduce the sounds of real drums. I found such a product at Toys R Us that claimed to have a "large 3-inch speaker," six drum pads, 10 fill-in music sounds, 10 awesome sound effects, separate volume controls for the drums and the background, tempo control, and a "big 3-inch speaker that generates HUGE sound!" (There was only one speaker, but it was double-billed.)
I brought it home yesterday to find that the drum pads didn't produce the sounds of drums—they produced drum sequences. So instead of just making a symbol noise when hit, it made the noise of a symbol being played for four beats. That meant it wouldn't work at all for the purpose I intended. My wife can't create drum rhythms if the rhythms are prefabricated. So my gift was a bust.
I ended up getting takeout at the local fine Italian dining restaurant (there were, of course, no tables available to walk-in customers) and explaining to my wife why I bought her such a useless little noise-making toy. She was touched to the point of tears, though, by the thought and effort I put into everything. She may be the first person I've known in my life that has sincerely and believably said, "It's the thought that counts."
I printed up the list of questions from Christianity Today that I linked to last week, and we had a wonderful time conversing and getting to know each other even better. It was a great night after all.
I just wish I hadn't been so flustered that I forgot about the dancing.
