Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Valentine’s Day

February 14, 2015 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

Valentines Candy Hearts (c)2015, Robert C Trube

Remember these?

I’m writing on Valentine’s Day and so I thought I would reflect on Valentine’s Day growing up.

Remember Valentine card exchanges and parties in elementary school?

I do. It was a day I approached with lots of fear and trepidation. I was a “Charlie Brown” kind of kid. Not the most popular, athletic, or good looking, and more than a bit nerdy. (Some would say nothing has changed!) My great fear was that when the cards were handed out, I wouldn’t get any–or only a very few. While all the other kids would be showing off all the cards they got, maybe counting them, I’d just shuffle off with my few.

It never really turned out that way. The combination of teacher and parental pressure made it a rule (can’t remember if it was spoken or not) that you gave a Valentine to every kid in your class. And we did. And even though I realized that and that my card count didn’t mean anything, I was still relieved. At least I had a box full of cards that I could take home and show mom. That made the cupcakes and Valentine candies that we had at our class parties so much tastier.

I don’t recall that these parties and exchanges went much beyond third grade. I suspect it would was increasingly hard to get boys to go along with all this. Apart from the food, this was all kind of “yucky” at that stage.

Neither my wife nor I recall this being a big deal for our parents. Maybe a card, maybe an extra kiss and a hug, but not the “big event” deal that it seems to have become these days with reservations at expensive restaurants and all the other trappings. In many cases, they couldn’t afford that many “big events” and the complex of card shops, florists, and restaurants hadn’t convinced them that all this was necessary.

Valentine Baptizing St. Lucilla. By Jacopo Bassano (Jacopo da Ponte) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

It’s kind of odd that this day is named after St. Valentine. For one thing, it appears there might be several figures with that name, all of whom were faithful priests and martyrs. A common element in all their stories was that they died rather than renouncing their faith. The most common account is that Valentine was the Bishop at Terni. Once, while being held prisoner, he was put to the test and healed a blind girl, resulting in his and other Christians being released. He was eventually reimprisoned under Claudius II who liked him until Valentine sought to convince Claudius to become a Christian. He was martyred February 14, 269.

The earliest reference to Valentine’s Day in connection with romantic love seems to be by Geoffrey Chaucer in Parlement of Foules in 1382 and there are early descriptions of the day as a celebration of romantic love in the French court of Charles VI in the early 1400s. So this connection has been around for a long time, but is still puzzling to me–except if you consider Valentine as a model of sacrificial love.

Actually I wonder if our parents understood more about the real St Valentine (whoever he was) than many on our contemporary scene. Real love for them went beyond the romantic gush that surrounds this day. It was showing up for your family, and showing up at church or mass. That was love, and something they celebrated in quiet but practical ways every day.

What are your memories of Valentine’s Day growing up?

Love That Lasts

February 14, 2014February 14, 2014 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

We celebrated Valentine’s Day over lunch today, since I’ll be working tonight. It included a stop at Half Price Books where my wife found a missing volume for a cook book series she collects. Made her day! (By the way, it is Booklovers Weekend and they are giving 20% discounts on everything if you receive or sign up for their emails).

This was our 36th Valentine’s Day, so I thought I might reflect on how we’ve made it this far in married life and can still say we are in love. Not that every moment has been lovey-dovey. Ruth Graham, the now deceased wife of Billy Graham was once asked if she’d ever contemplated divorce. Her reply was something to the effect of: divorce never, murder frequently! My wife would probably be justified in similar thoughts! So how did love last for us?

1. We were blessed with good role models. Our parents on both sides had “until death do you part” marriages. They weren’t perfect and we watched them work, however imperfectly, through the tough spots. Between my siblings and me, we have over 100 years of marriage. Our parents must have done something right. At very least, they demonstrated what could happen when you decided that quitting wasn’t an option.

2. We kiss first thing every morning and try to go to bed every night without unresolved issues between us. The apostle Paul wrote, “be angry but do not sin, do not let the sun go down on your anger.” My wife says she is not passive-aggressive, but rather just aggressive! That’s been good for me–in my family we tended to keep things a bit more bottled up and then just exploded. So we do get angry sometimes, and have to work to hear each other out. I’ve spoken the words, “I’m sorry, I was wrong” on many occasions. We try to get to the place where the last thing we do is kiss (and mean it) at night.

3. We’ve sought to guard our hearts in the sense of not giving to another the affections that belong only to our spouse. We’ve seen love grow cold between spouses and also seen affairs spring up when an attraction becomes a flirtation then becomes an infatuation, and finally an affair. Speaking and showing love daily helps stir up the fires. Setting boundaries with the opposite gender and speaking often in positive terms of our spouses with them helps.

4. Looking back at some of the hard places we’ve gone through, I think of hardships as God’s forge that has made our love deeper and more enduring. Cancer, caring for parents and losing them, and our own experience of parenting from those early sleepless nights through the college years called us to listen, to pray, to serve each other, to recognize and put to death our inherent selfishness.

5. Perhaps at the bottom of all, our marriage has lasted by the grace of God. I think again and again as I witness young couples give their marriage vows of what audacious promises we are making to each other! Perhaps being loved by a God that will not let us go and that went to all lengths to woo us challenges us to cry out for and imitate that kind of love for each other. And perhaps because we know the love of such a God, we don’t look for each other to be “god-like” lovers. That relieves a good deal of pressure!

Last night, we heard an artist, Joe Anastasi, who has painted portraits of the homeless in our city (here is a YouTube where he talks about his work). What was amazing in viewing his paints was how he captured something of the depths and dignity and soul of people we often avert our eyes from. I was reminded again how there are depths and wonders in every human life that it takes a lifetime to discover. One of the wonders of marriage for life is that we have the time to truly explore the depths and wonder of another person, to cherish and nourish and celebrate that with each other through the various seasons of life. I’m so glad to be on that journey with the one I love, and for the grace and protection of God who has given us nearly 36 years so far. Happy Valentines Day, my love!

(For more thoughts on this thing called love, see my post from earlier this week, Love Stories.)

Love Stories

February 9, 2014February 9, 2014 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments

For any of you who have followed me, you have probably figured out that you won’t see many reviews of love stories, and likely none of romance novels. Between the ads that show up on my Kindle and posts this week (as Valentine’s Day approaches), in places like the New York Times Review of Books and Publishers Weekly, it has come to my awareness that I am definitely out of step with a certain segment of the reading public!

I can readily hear the women who follow this blog shouting at this point, “it’s because you are a man!” All I can say to that is, “guilty as charged!” Personally, I’d like to think it is because I am living two of the greatest love stories I’ve known–one with my wife of 35 years and one as part of the church as Christ’s betrothed and beloved of God.

That said, on further reflection, I have to say that I enjoy love stories when they are part of bigger stories. Right now I am reading Glorious War, an account of George Custer’s Civil War adventures. Interspersed with narratives of Custer’s boldness, strategic sense, and courage in battles, we have the adventure of his courtship and marriage of Libbie Bacon. The love story is a welcome respite from the battle scenes and helps me see Custer as more than a one dimensional figure.

Likewise, one of the things I’ve always loved about Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter is that it sets her marriage and deepening love for Nathan Coulter alongside the challenges of rural agriculture, the memories of war, and the obligations of extended family and community.

It was fascinating for me to read Caitlin Flanagan’s review of Daniel Jones Love Illuminated. Jones edits the “Modern Love” column for The New York Times. She expresses her surprise at her discovery of a central thread in Jones book:

“We were promised an exploration of life’s most mystifying subject, but instead what we keep coming back to is a study of life’s least mystifying subject: how it might come to pass that two like-minded graduate students in the same creative writing program might fall in love, get married, learn that marriage is not composed of an unfolding series of ever-heightened erotic pleasures, and yet still manage, year after year, to keep their leaky but serviceable vessel out of dry dock.”

Maybe this explains for me why I like the kinds of love narratives I’ve described above. They are situated in the much larger and yet less fantastic context of real lived, human experience. I like the phrase “leaky but serviceable vessel”. Real love wars with our personal selfishness and calls us into self-denying love. It struggles through raising children together, financial tensions, illness of parents or spouse, the tension of the siren call of career and the harder work of going deeper in the encounter with one other. Probably like others on this journey, I have to say it has been only in a small measure what I imagined, and looking back over 35 years, far better than I could ever have hoped.

As I write these words I’m conscious of my single or formerly married friends. I neither want to venture explanations of why one hasn’t yet found the love we’ve lived these many years nor why it hasn’t worked out for another. That would only be to add to the pain. What I would propose instead is that the love stories we read should not be the ones that are anodynes for our pain or fantasies of what we wish we had, but the narratives that set love in the larger context of life, that prepare us to be better lovers wherever God gives us the chance to love.