What I Can’t Know Ends Delightfully

I don’t know about everyone else in the world but each year as February 14th approaches I begin to feel a little bit of pressure and panic. I don’t know why I do since just about every year for Valentine’s Day I’ve provided to my lovely bride what I have affectionately coined a complete and utter suck-fest. Yes, it’s true and I admit it here openly, I completely suck at Valentine’s Day. I don’t know what it is about the day but I seem to have some type of block at being able to put together something nice and meaningful for the woman that has been there for me time and time again over the past 20 years. You would think that after all of that time it would be easy, right? Seriously, this is the only other person in the world that I probably know almost as well as I know myself. Why can’t I get it right?

Well this year I was determined to get it right. I was going to take the complete and total suck-fest and wipe it from existence. I was going to make this fun, I was going to make it exciting, and I was going to provide my wife something and do so with a grand gesture all to let her know that I love and appreciate her. Yes I was determined, I was completely dedicated to the cause and I was completely clueless on what I was going to do.

By the time this past Monday rolled around I was starting to have that panic set in. I was less than six days away and had absolutely nothing  planned. I sat on the BART commuter train completed dejected and lost. As I turned my head upward to ask for guidance my eye caught a sign and I realized that this sign was just the sign that I was looking for.

Ever since we lived in Los Angeles my wife has made it pretty darn clear to me that she would really like to go see the musical WICKED. I admit I too was very curious about it and as I sat on that BART train there before me was an advertisement reminding me and all of the other riders of the train that tickets were still available. This set the wheels in my head a turning and a plan started to evolve. I made phone calls, I ran errands on my lunch break, I confirmed baby sitting and I knew that THIS year the cycle of SUCK would END!

First and foremost I didn’t want to just come home and tell my lovely wife that I was taking her to WICKED. Where is the fun in that? That’s the equivalent of just coming home and saying I’d take her to a nice steak dinner, to a movie, or whatever else. Yes it could set her up for some anticipation to actually getting to see the show but it wouldn’t do a darn thing in the way of real fun. I also wanted to make this fun for myself as well. With my plan in mind I simply told my wife that we would have to drop our daughter off at her Mom’s on Saturday at noon and that everything else would be a surprise. When she asked what we would be doing I simply smirked and told her, “Every time you get antsy because you don’t know what is going on simply tell yourself, ‘What I can’t know ends delightfully.” If you have a careful eye you can tell that in telling her that I actually told her what we were doing but not in a direct way.

Before Saturday I packed a purple bag with three gifts.

Each gift had a strategic time to be opened. With our daughter safely dropped off at my mother-in-law’s house I gave her the first package to open.

To those of you that might be wondering the answer is yes I did in fact print out and glue the conversation hearts onto the box. What was inside the box you ask? A BART ticket. Yup, nothing says romance like public transportation! Believe it or not though taking BART was a part of the plan.

As we approached the 12th Street Station in Oakland I gave her the second gift to open.

That right there is a box AND an envelope. In my mind the former necessitated the latter. You see I didn’t exactly buy these tickets way in advance so I had to take the best seats that I could get. Those seats were located in the very last row of the mazzanine level, so we were going to be above and back from the stage. Having never been to the Orpheum theater in San Francisco I didn’t know if we were going to have a problem seeing the stage in an acceptable level of detail so I bought a pair of binoculars just in case we might need them.

So in introducing this weird gift I decided that I needed to throw her off of why she might be getting these things. I was on the same mode of public transportation that reminded me about WICKED so I thought there was a chance we might be on a train that would have them as well and if she saw the advert and had the binoculars maybe her mind might connect the two. I know, a bit convuluted but I couldn’t take a chance so in the envelope I put a picture of some San Francisco wild parrots to completely confuse and and make her think her husband is an absolute bafoon who might be taking her into the city to see parrots that she couldn’t care less about seeing.

Four BART stops later I tell my lovely wife that it’s time to get off the train and we began our ascent back to the surface world from the subterranian Civic Center station. As we do so I hand her the envelope that has the tickets as well as the reveal of the nutty mantra that I gave her earlier in the week.

As you can see each heart is green, just like the main character Elphaba. The first letter of each word is in a different color from the rest of the letters so that when you look at it from top to bottom each first letter spells out WICKED. I handed her the envelope and kept her back to the Orpheum and waited as she looked at the envelope in her hand. She looked at it and looked at me and…. it was pretty clear that my clever little message wasn’t getting across. I looked up towards the marquee, her eyes followed mine and her excitement made me feel like I just won the Super Bowl of Valentine’s Day gifts.

Thankfully that wasn’t everything as I also had reservations at the Market Street Restaurant and Grill across the street for a wonderful post show dinner.

So there you have it. This VD I went from Zero to Hero. Now the panic is setting in again because I now realize one frightening thought: How the hell am I going to top this next year?!?!?!