When love just isn’t in the cards

Excuse my bed head and puffy eyes. I’m coming off Valentine’s Day with another Hallmark hangover.

I don’t know what exactly I said last night, via the greeting card I gave my wife, but I’m certain that it was probably stupid.

There she is, this woman I love. Before we met, my life teetered upon aged pilings with dry rot. She came along and built a stone foundation for my soul. And what does she receive in return?

Envelope, please …

A wise-cracking Valentine’s Day card saying something about keeping up the good work?

I’m a fool.

I know you dark-eyed men of night, under florescence, trawling the bulwark of greeting cards at the pharmacy. I know you, because I count myself among you. Go ahead, stare at your shoes and get defensive. “Well, what am I supposed to do, get her this one?” you say, pointing to one of those top-shelf, velvet-coated cards the size of menu at a Greek diner, thick with platitudes and appalling poetry.

Good point.

Anyway, each Valentine’s Day most of us feel it’s our duty to buy a card. In fact, something like 200 million Valentine’s Day greeting cards were exchanged yesterday, according to card counters at Hallmark, the world’s largest greeting card manufacturer.

But why?

Because in our culture, a card counts. It’s the affordable alternative to hiring a mariachi band.

Still, you know it and I know it: By shopping for a greeting card for our loved ones we enter desperate terrain. We are doing little more than pan-handling for a proper sentiment. “Brother, can you spare a little something sweet or serious or even silly, printed up in cursive or squiggles, whatever you got?”

It’s not just all the card choices encompassing the whole spectrum of emotion, from irony to idealism. It’s not just the often-tortuous attempt to find what card buyers refer to with a longing twinkle in the eye as “the right card.” For me, the problem mostly is the pestering suspicion that I’ve been lulled into a card-consumer stupor in which no one but card companies finds true satisfaction.

Card-buying invites a fear of falseness. For one thing, someone else wrote the cards (I always picture the writer is either a backwoodsman in Upper Michigan who’s just trying to earn a little extra ammo money in between ghost writing his hound dog Horace’s autobiography. Or I picture a middle-aged woman living in a beach house in Truro who’s just trying to pay her defense attorney his fees. He got her off that rap stemming from those three years when she was stalking Danielle Steel).

Time passes slowly at the card racks.

I consider the inherent pitfalls of purchasing greeting cards. Specifically, whether my attempts throughout the years of giving something sincere are actually viewed by my wife as something cynical. Or whether my attempts are cynical, but she sees only sincerity. I do this every year. I wonder whether, in the end, all this effort and apprehension act to purify the process. Then, I settle on the obvious conclusion. “It’s Valentine’s Day. I have to get a card.”

Yeah, yeah, I take her to dinner. I give her flowers, too. But buying her a greeting card, though written by someone unknown to me, feels like the most personal approach. For goodness sakes, why? Because we are a species hard-wired for words. We seek, instinctively, to translate into sentimental blueprints the castles in our hearts.

But why a card? Why not write a poem? Hell, why not a manifesto — a Declaration of Dependence? Why allow card companies, these third-person arbiters, to determine my emotional vital signs? I’ll let you in on a little secret: I’m a chicken, that’s why. Like you and you and you, I’m afraid that my own words will fall dreadfully short of their mark, like carrier pigeons suddenly losing their bearings and smacking into each other over the mid-Atlantic.

And so I am among the dark-eyed men of night, under florescence, at the card racks in the pharmacy because it’s the easy way out.

But I know what happens next. This morning, I’ll gaze at her photo on the mantel — this lover, partner and pal — and I’ll feel ashamed for allowing a bunch of corporate bozos do my romantic bidding.

Then, finally, words — my own words, the perfect words — will come to me.

 “How do I hate Hallmark? Let me count the ways…”