50+ Lifestyles

Max’s Musings

By Max Molleston

Valentine’s Day is big business in the greeting card kingdom, and it should be. Lots of us get to journey to our closest or favorite place to select a card that is just right for looks and sentiment level.

What a winter season, so far, for those if us bound to this land. Not gone south for the winter, or taken to the ski lanes that provide much more fun. No, we are shoveling. We hope for a February thaw, after wanting one a month earlier. Where we live, in coralville, there are big piles of snow, and that doesn’t exclude you folks, I’ll bet. One thing to count on for us romantics is Valentine’s Day. Over the years I’ve done this column, I have explored the literature (or romance) in cards of all range of costs. I did Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s fine poetry regarding her suitor then husband, Robert Browning. Mostly the messages from one to another for Valentine’s Day, they tell of varying levels of love and affection. Some comic, some sugary. Mostly short verses. There is some measure of skill level. In this column of 2005, my favorite was this: “Wishing you the sun, the moon, the stars and candy bars.” Not very Valentiine-like, but kindergartners can get the language and the meaning. Most of us are capable of thinking up short rhymes.

This is a poem about the development of a forgiving nature, if the “Holidaze” spending spree moved like a 4th of July rocket.

The Hardship of Accounting

Never ask of money spent
Where the spender thinks it went.
Nobody was ever meant
to remember or invent
What he did with every cent.

Robert Frost is the responsible poet. This is the kind of poem we can think of, but those of us measure to 50 plus need to have a pen ready to put our thoughts on paper. Here is a short poem I wrote in the early 1980s. It has that smaltzy Valentine tendency if you give it a little push.

Well Groomed

I combed through our acquaintance
And some feelings were torn out.
Others fell free.

I brushed through our knowledge
of one another and it shone
not brassy but more well kept
and under control.

For me, “Well Groomed” is an affection in process, from a strong early rush of attraction to a state of mind that may couple appreciation in a new layer of affection over some time. I am not, of course, Dr. Phil and didn’t know it was such a message for change when I composed it. It is also playful as we crank the sentiment in the second stanza. First “shone” is from shine, and not used so much in literature poetry three or four decades in the past. Along with the “shone” I brought in “brassy.” My brassy comes from the military shine, which is a bright rub-over with a liquid brand Brasso, a commercial product all in the military used for purposes of passing inspections, an event called to check the status of the individual soldiers’ gear and general appearance. Most of us kept our brass belt buckles shined via Brasso, and our Army dress uniforms had brass plated insignia that needed to “look sharp,” and were Brasso’ed.

Our point of reference on the 14th of February each year is honoring a relationship. Valentine’s Day is big business in the greeting card kingdom, and it should be. Lots of us get to journey to our closest or favorite place to select a card that is just right for looks and sentiment level. Do not fail to do so: “it’s the economy, dummy!”

This is the shortest month of the year, and so we “try” to reduce our wordiness. Remember one thing; with all the snow around, a February thaw might be hydrologically testy. as the midwest and other areas succumb to the breezes and temperatures that mean Spring. People in communities on the banks of major, or even minor Iowa riverbeds will be wathcful of the potential to flood. I guess I do not have to end our monthly visit with such a vigil possibility, but I do have a news background, and as early as 1972 helicoptered from Dubuque to Burlington and back, shooting film to be sued to discuss the Mississippi River flood.

I sincerely hope those of you reading this column continue your courage about life and its varying outcomes, till we work to better times in March.