Friday, February 12th, 1999.
Matt and I had been dating for just a few weeks.
We were at Trolley Square in Salt Lake City, having just finished dinner at The Old Spaghetti Factory (one of life's great pleasures is spaghetti with mizithra cheese and browned butter, in case you didn't know) and we were standing outside waiting to go into the movie theater to watch You've Got Mail.
Matt leaned over to me and whispered, "Happy Valentine's Day."
"Happy Valentine's Day!" I replied. And then after a brief pause, "You know it's not until Sunday, right?"
No, he did not know that Valentine's Day was always on February 14th. He thought it was like Thanksgiving, always falling on the 2nd Friday in February.
I should have known then that this was an omen for Valentine's Days to come. It is sort of a running joke in our house that Matt is notoriously bad at Valentine's Day. I think my favorite memory is finding ourselves sitting at an In 'n Out Burger one fine Valentine's evening circa 2002. But when you're so good at everything else, you can afford to be bad at this one little thing. In fact, I actually find it rather endearing.
And when you stay up hand drawing these cards for your daughters on the night before Valentine's Day, you can be forgiven pretty much anything (even giving Lucy the wrong color hair).
Happy Valentine's Day!
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