Elder Advice

Thinking Inside the Box - 156

“I love you”, Lisa murmured, as we shared a glass of pinot noir last night. “Hmm, is that you or the wine talking”? I asked. “I was talking to the wine,” she replied.

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. And such exchanges are to be expected, I suppose, when you have been married for decades although, all things considered, I would have preferred the sentiment a favourite client of mine, who has been married for 50 years, received from his wife this February 14: “I still love you - see previous years’ cards for details.”

As Elder Advice watched the endless line of the lovelorn at the local florist, all young Romeos desperate to keep their Juliets from reminiscing about the suitors that would have better suited them, his thoughts turned to the hazy hagiography of St Valentine. We are told he was the Bishop of Terni who was summoned to Rome to assist a student “whose head had been stuck between his knees for three years”. Valentinus, as he then was, apparently cured the student, which led to the student’s family converting to Christianity. Promptly arrested for complicity in that crime by the prefect of Rome, and ordered to sacrifice to the pagan gods, Valentinus refused and was, of course, beheaded.

Leaving aside the inexplicable absence of flowers, chocolate, and protestations of undying love from that tale, Elder Advice has some serious questions about the evolution of Valentine’s Day which, by the 15th century was entrenched in England and France as a romantic occasion which required the exchange of love poems. Falling prey to the notion that the Catholic Church simply appropriated Lupercalia, one more pagan fertility festival it decided needed Christianizing, and replaced it with a feast day for St Valentine, seems dull and predictable. Elder Advice prefers to make the obvious connection between romance and losing your head. Neither however, explains the peculiar predicament of that student. Perhaps we have been missing something more nuanced - a correlation between enduring 3 years of unrequited love and having your head up your ass, perhaps.

Cupid has been on Elder Advice’s mind of late although, given the incessant Presidential prattle about annexing Canada and Greenland, it may have been cupidity. An easy mistake to make: Trump and Cupid. Chubby. Infantile. Allowed to use weapons they should never have been given. Small hands, etc.

Anyway, in the continuing chaos of world events and its depressing display of human frailties - tyranny, avarice, vainglory, arrogance, hostility, indifference, capriciousness, hypocrisy, cruelty - a little love would be welcome.

Elder Advice? More Cupid, less cupidity, probably sums it up. Love is, after all, what separates us from the other animals. Well, that and the fact we don’t clean our genitals with our tongues.

… Except maybe that student.