2.15.2006

romance is romantic when you've got the answers.

I was thinking about my entry last night, and I thought about how cynical I sounded. I am not down on love. I used to consider myself a hopeless romantic, though I think a more accurate description would be "sixteen-year-old girl." I have become cynical about Valentine's Day. The overadvertising and prepackaged gifts you can buy on the side of the road on your way home from work haven't helped. Then I think that waiting tables made me cynical about every holiday, because I had to spend them helping other people celebrate. Nothing sucks the joy out of a holiday like not having one. Every holiday I've spent in my post-server days, I've sent out more than a little good karma to those still in the trenches. I remember my time served, and it was the overflowing parking lot at Cha-Da Thai last night that reminded me of one working Valentine's Day.

I was working a Valentine's Day lunch shift, a shift which turned out not to be all that much busier than any other lunch shift on a holiday weekend, which was busy enough. We had a reservation on the books, which was not just unusual for the day shift, it was unheard of and pretty unnecessary. Sure, we had large parties who would call and reserve a room, but to have a couple of people reserve a table for lunch didn't happen. What's more, the guy had come by early and selected the table himself, as well as brought some flowers to be ready and waiting at the table.

None of us who were working had taken the reservation, so we didn't know who to expect. We were all curious, being proud owners of double-X chromosomes, what kind of gallant and romantic man might appear at our door claiming the 12:00 reservation. Someone wealthy and cultured, European perhaps, charming and respectful. A true romantic like the ones we saw in the movies, but detected only traces of in the college boys we dated.

And then he entered with his young date, and the mystery man was revealed. Except he was more like a mystery boy. His date was young, but he wasn't much older, a high school kid with what was probably his first girlfriend. They were both right at that age where the braces have come off, but their awkward stages were still clinging visibly to them, refusing to let the poor kids turn into human beings who fit into their bodies properly and boasted clear skin.

I led them to their reserved table with its carefully pre-placed flowers. As I set out the menus and silverware, the boy pulled out his date's chair. Oh my Lord, it was so cute. They sat in their fancy high-backed chairs and fiddled with the starched white tablecloth and looked kindof out of place as they ordered sodas and chicken sandwiches with french fries. I tried to put on my most professional snooty waitress voice, wanting to give the boy every advantage he could get.

Oh, that boy, he was trying so hard to do this holiday right, to take a pretty girl out and make her like him with all the things that he'd heard somewhere were romantic. Us waitresses watched and giggled at the pure and innocent sweetness of it all, remembering when we used to be teenage girls with ridiculous pre-conceived notions about love. We looked at the scene as if it were an old and gone part of us. But I think now, that if some boy took us out for lunch with reservations and arranged to have flowers waiting at the best table in the house, we'd melt like the 16-year-old girls we still are inside.

It is that boy that I think of whenever I see those roadside teddy bear stands with their impersonal, cellophane-enclosed gifts. It is that 12:00 reservation in an almost empty restaurant that I recall when I become nauseated with the ubiquity of Pepto Bismol pink in February. It is that pulled-out chair and those flowers that I remember when I hear another radio ad promoting unflattering stereotypes of both women and men. Valentine's Day sucks, but romance is still a pretty good idea.

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