Sweet, sweet Nancy: Another year passes with us, and we enjoy the grandest of all dates on the calendar—Valentine’s Day! Oh, blessed Valentine, saint of all things love-oriented. No single day stands more important to me than his day, which should explain why I always forget out anniversary. I save my mental energy for love day. Valentine’s.

Centuries ago, when the Roman gods and their saints still walked the earth, St. Valentine bowed down to the people, who were as big to him as chihuahuas are to us, and said, “Let one day stand as a testament to the greatest gift of all that I’ve given you—love.” I may be paraphrasing. I read it all in a book. But that’s the kind of love we have—exact quotations aren’t necessary.

So we celebrate the day of Valentine’s, this giant of a saint, in our favorite traditional way: dinner for two at T.G.I. Friday’s. Appetizers of potato skins and mozzarella sticks set the tone for the evening. As I give you the last mozzarella stick out of the basket, you know it’s not because I dislike the taste—if anything I’m the one who loves mozzarella more, between the two of us. But that’s not the point. I would sacrifice the mozzarella stick if cheese were the very thing I breathe, in some sort of parallel universe of cheese-breathers, and the mozzarella stick were some kind of tiny scuba tube for breathing. It’s probably not enough cheese to really breathe for much longer, but you understand my meaning. Also, you don’t breathe cheese. Does that grab you by the throat? I would sacrifice my life just so you could enjoy the taste of cheese. I’m serious about it.

The truth is, I do not even like T.G.I. Friday’s all that much. I would rather eat at Tango’s Barbecue, or perhaps at Domino’s, and get take-out to celebrate our love at home, in our bedroom and living room, and perhaps later in the kitchen. But fate cannot be roped around the snout and directed around by us mortals. We met at T.G.I. Friday’s that fateful New Year’s Day, when they refused to serve me any more alcohol. You came to my rescue that day, as you have come to my rescue ever since, inebriating my heart with your love so I do not need quite so much alcohol as I used to. And that’s why T.G.I. Friday’s is so sacred to me, and why it still turns me on when you wear the uniform in the bedroom.

Would that I had the power—that I were a man with all the powers of the universe, or at least handy at carpentry and masonry. I would build us a temple to represent all the things our love is to us. Pillars, twenty-feet high! A throne for you and you alone, rising fifteen feet high, so high you could not even sit in it, and quite pointless indeed. But you could stare on that temple from whatever higher point you are at, and realize that I, Chals, have built you that temple just to look on. A temple so big the building code people would likely condemn it for being too big, and possibly a fire hazard, depending on what I built it from. I’m thinking stone, but I wouldn’t be adverse to wood, if it were cheaper.

Nancy, isn’t this love bigger than the both of us? Would you have me spend next year’s Valentine’s Day at T.G.I. Friday’s alone? The “threesome” suggestion was only a joke. I never would have asked that waitress if I knew you would take it so seriously. Please, come back. Your mother keeps hanging up the phone on me.