happy st. valentine’s

I guess on Valentine’s, if you are lucky enough to have someone, no matter how far away, the least you can do is build them a little shrine on your blog and hope they don’t think you’re too whacked out. This weekend, to prove my belief that hockey is love and it’s always a good day for that, I showed up one snowy Pittsburgh Saturday to watch Superstar play in his last college hockey game of the forever ended season. It was exciting and sad and Superstar beamed in that way that only the goofy can who know they’d have been too illogical to have made this work by themselves. That’s why it’s always important to date someone crazier than you. It’s probably how we ended up being the purveyors of alcoholic beverages for the team captain’s “rockin’ after hockey party” that would have been a whole lot less rockin’ without us geezers showing up with the goods. While I do expect a thank you, I know we’ll never get one. It’s just another fine memory of CMU, hockey, and the home game at which some undergrad thought my boyfriend was 40. It’s ok Superstar, you’re still a star to me, and there’s nothing wrong with being more than old enough to buy booze.

Friday we skated, Sunday we skated, Saturday I watched people skate, and ever since I got home I’ve dreamed of skating. I have this strange nostalgia about Pittsburgh that differs from childhood memories of places and things gone by. It’s grittier and grown-up and more romantic — love in a depressed, rusty city with snow and hockey and curling up under blankets in old brick houses with splintered hardwood floors. It’s staying up until 4 a.m. to do homework and then seeing the light come in through the long windows and knowing you still had to face the day. It’s living in a town where every corner is a mystery and nothing ever looks the same. It’s a sly second of life you know you can never recreate, but can still go back and visit if you don’t use up all your vacation days at work. It’s where Superstar still calls home and the place from which I hope to whisk him away in two short months from now. I just have to make sure there’s hockey at the intended destination if I ever hope to keep him there.

And on this Valentine’s Day, a friend of mine who doesn’t like this contrived holiday so much still understands what everyone is stressing about, in this little observation she sent me by James A. Baldwin.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.