May Day

May Day (May 1), 2016.

(knock knock)

Me: Frenchie!

(hands me a bouquet of lily-of-the-valley)

Mary: In France it is tradition to give muguet to someone you love on May Day, and I love you.

(I smell the muguet, feeling extra cool and European since I know now the translation for lily-of-the-valley. The same way I feel cool when I cook with fingerling potatoes instead of russets or when I shop at a "centre" instead of a "center." Frenchie is often kneeling in her yard tending the shady muguet bed. She does not wear gloves for gardening and her olive skin doesn’t need sunscreen. She is hardcore with French traditions and sometimes makes me sad I don’t do anything Yugoslavian for my family or neighbors. Maybe I could start giving people sheep and potatoes.)

I was on Cloud 9 the rest of the week every time I looked at my muguet in the bud vase on my desk. Now, I'll admit I typically assume Frenchie loves me because we’ve been friends forever and we don’t do mean things to each other. Yet there was something sublime in hearing the full phrase I LOVE YOU. Not LUV YA or XOXO or *heart emoji* but the drawn-out, unadulterated, life-validating trinity of I LOVE YOU.

My dad told me he never heard the words I LOVE YOU growing up. He did say the day he left for Vietnam his dad and stepmom said WE LOVE YOU, which is kind of close but not exactly what a scared boy needs to hear as he heads for war. In my opinion, my dad needed a father’s rib-cracking bear hug and a solid, undeniable I LOVE YOU to pack in his pocket as he left the continent. I’m not saying his dad didn’t love him; he mailed cooked lamb chops to Vietnam, after all, but there is power in the full phrase.

Greg is unusually stellar at telling me he loves me. He doesn’t text, send smoke signals, or write snail mail but he does call me at least twice a day to say I LOVE YOU. One of those times is around 4 pm when he’s driving to Wendy’s to get a late, colon-killing, dinner-spoiling lunch. I am not as good as he is because as we are falling asleep each night he often asks DO YOU LOVE ME? I say YES. He asks HOW MUCH? I say INFINITY PLUS SIX (a family number that means the highest value from zero possible) and drift to sleep. I should tell him the real deal more, though, because the muguet incident reminded me how nice love unfeigned feels.

I LOVE YOU, GREG!

I love that you happily work, happily serve, consistently deal with a mouth full of cankers, and are totally down for Meatless Mondays (only kidding, I’m just checking to see if you read this). I love you for always getting out of bed to fill my water bottle or turn the thermostat down because I’m tucked in with six pillows and can’t move. I love you when you wrestle Archer and sing like a bucktoothed rabbit to make RE laugh at the table. I love you no matter how many times you watch “I Am a Champion” or that Ronald Reagan thing on youtube. I love you for climbing the slippery, rainy pear tree in your Crocs and almost falling “Pollyanna Style” in an effort to hang my new birdfeeder.

I love you for never saying stuff like I wish you were more athletic or I wish you liked deviled eggs or I wish you were more of a morning person or I wish you were as good at Excel as I am or I wish you were something you’re not. I love you for being a simple person (you’re like an Oreck vacuum; simply built, easy to tune-up, no weighty frills) and for seeing life simply, too. Sometimes I wonder if we are living on the same planet but I do believe you when you tell me I’m making things unnecessarily difficult.

There was a silly student campaign that promoted bananas when I was in college. They claimed bananas were the perfect fruit because they came gift-wrapped, didn’t have to be washed, had plenty of natural sugar, and were even safe for babies to digest. I think I LOVE YOU is the banana-equivalent of words. It’s the perfect phrase because it’s free to say, it’s super sweet, you don’t have to embellish it, and anyone can digest it.