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‘Darling Mommie Poo,
Feb 14 may be the date they observe and call Valentine’s Day but that is for people of only ordinary luck. I happen to have a ‘Valentine Life’ which started on March 4, 1952 and will continue as long as I have you. Therefore realising the importance of this to me, will you be my Valentine from now on and forever and ever? You see my choice is limited, a Valentine’s life or no life because I love you very much.
Poppa.’
Poppa here is late US President Ronald Reagan and ‘Mommie Poo’ ( I wonder why he called her that, maybe their young son liked to poop a lot) is Nancy Reagan, who died earlier this week. Theirs was one of the great love stories of the last century. Ronnie and Nancy were really virtually inseparable, from the day they met (on set) till the day Reagan died.
That particular letter, written on Valentine’s Day of 1960, was signed off by a doodle of two love hearts. Pierced through by one Cupid’s arrow. You would expect such sentiment from a teen suffering serious infatuation, but Ronnie was fifty when he wrote his sweetheart that letter. Think back to four weekends ago, if you are a man.
That was Valentine’s Day weekend. Are you doing for your woman what you did for her then, as your lifelong Valentine, or are you just thinking about the EPL games this weekend; waiting to show that level of affection in another eleven months?
Getting a woman into your house is like growing a series of yellow hibiscus in your yard (our outdoor expert can expound more on that). They require a lot of watering and tendering and care and attention.
Which, as most men complain, can be most exhausting.
Let us move on, then, to the lost art of love letter writing.
When we were in high school, we used to write these lengthy letters to lasses in schools, near and far, most met during the high school drama festivals.
They would be imaginatively composed, complete with food imagery (you are the only meat in my githeri, I wonder why we never thought of break up lines like ‘but now you have become the weevil in my nyoyo’ in those halcyon days of Nyayo).
Poets like us literally made extra bread (Boflo) by dashing out verse for other boys to send to their girls. A dab of deodorant, or even a drenching of toilet spray to give the letter a distinctive scent ... and then, off the letter would be sent, waiting like a prophet in the desert for the teenage goddess to reply.
All that is lost, thanks to modern day technology.
There is e-mail, yes, but it feels a little bit official to craft love letters on.
Facebook and WhatsApp chats are too two-way and conversational for that one way intensity that is required to pour out one’s feelings, straight from the heart, to the other party (and don’t forget the perverts). In teen and young adults’ hands, texts tend to get sexualised, and soon you have ‘sexts.’
As for Twitter, nothing worth saying in matters of the heart can be said in only 140 characters. Twitter is only good for insults.
‘Twitter is for twits and twats and half wits.’ Forty six characters.
Which leaves us with 94 characters, none of whom is as wise as 94-year-old Nancy Reagan was when it came to the matter of loving a man with all her heart.
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