Randy Fitzgerald

On Valentine’s Day this year, Barb and I found ourselves in Gordonsville, Virginia, at a really nice bed and breakfast called Wolf Trap Farm. We had left Richmond late, after a long, hard day during which we both had worked to finish up a bunch of separate, overdue projects. By the time we reached our destination that night, it was dark, we were exhausted, stores were closed—and we each had to admit that we hadn’t had time to buy Valentine’s presents for one another.

            I was especially ill prepared.  I had neither present nor card. Barb had a card for me, at least, but no present.  “Why don’t we just forget about the presents this year,” she suggested. “There’s really nothing we need, and I can’t think of anything I want. Staying at this beautiful B&B is more than enough.”

            Listen, I may be getting old, folks, but I’m not getting stupid. A husband who doesn’t buy his wife something for Valentine’s, whatever she says, is taking a dangerous chance.  But what to do? All the shops on Gordonsville’s Main Street were deserted and dark, and we were too tired to stage a hunt for something that might be open. 

I decided to focus on one thing at a time. Around seven we drove to the local grocery store so I could at least buy a card. And while I was doing that, Barb got us a lovely dinner-to-go from a nearby Italian restaurant. Coming out, she spied the answer to our lack of presents: a Family Dollar Store at the end of the strip mall.

            “This will be fun,” she told me when she picked me up at the grocery. “We’ll get our presents at Family Dollar, and we’ll each have a $10 limit. How does that sound?”

            Actually, it sounded like a plan, and maybe even fun. So off we went to different parts of the dollar store like kids on an Easter egg hunt.

            There was so much good stuff in that place that after about ten minutes we had to meet mid-store and agree to up the ante from $10 to $15. We soon left with two bags apiece, smiles on our faces, and more money in our wallets than anyone should ever have after a Valentine’s “shopping spree.”

            Here’s some of what we found at Family Dollar to save our Valentine’s:

The most puzzling gift to me from Barb was a set of ladies’ false fingernails, with clear polish. Barb reminded me that I’m always complaining that it’s hard to strum my banjo with my short fingernails, so now I could just glue one of these on my strumming finger as needed. “Good idea,” I told her, “but it might have been better had you found some without the little blue flower down here on the bottom.”

            I gave her two wooden picture frames, displaying two poems I had hurriedly written for her after we got back to Wolf Trap—and if you think I’m going to share my poems here, dream on.  (But I will tell you that one was a limerick.)

She gave me a gaudy little three-dimensional plaque with the message “The place to be happy is here.” 

            “Where should I put it?” I asked her.

            “It doesn’t make any difference,” she said. “Move it around if you’d like, to remind yourself that a person can be happy anywhere.”

            I found for her a mystery novel, some razors (because she’s always using mine) and a sink strainer just like one she had admired earlier in the drain at Wolf Trap Farm. She gave me Elmer’s Glue (not for the fingernails, but because I had been fruitlessly searching for some a week or so earlier), and razors, because she’s always using mine. She gave me a Made-in-America (obviously one-of-a-kind) toothbrush with real bristles—not those plastic sticks and circles that most toothbrushes have of late.

 I gave her an ice scraper, so she’ll stop using her credit card to clean the car windows. We exchanged our favorite candy bars, and she found for me a colorful jar (with only a small crack) for 60 cents, to hold pencils on my desk.

            I initially thought my best purchase for her was a bottle of a usually very expensive name brand of shampoo, but the wind went out of my sails a bit when Barb read aloud that it was the formula for “weak and damaged hair.”  Uh-uh.

            There was more—an amazing amount of “stuff,” in fact, for $15 apiece, and we had a lot of fun both in choosing and opening those crazy gifts. In fact, I’ll probably remember these presents better than some of the expensive Valentine’s gifts we’ve shared over the years.

            Oh, yes, about the cards:  She got mine at a card shop in Richmond a week earlier, and I got hers at a grocery store in Gordonsville at the last minute, but somehow we ended up with exactly the same one.