Oh the great expectations of Valentine’s Day.

Here are mine: Arousal.

Dreams–that are normal.

Disappointment, assuaged.

Plan A: Ocean-view room in deserted Bar Harbor, Maine where I planned to take my valentine for a weekend of cross-country skiing and snowshoeing in Acadia National Park. We would have found a brew pub. The town library. Might have shoveled out the fire pits on the coast in Southwest Harbor and created a big, hot-burning blaze. Crazy love.

But the romantic cuddle-huddle against the cold and snow-blinding love won’t happen in that setting, because another blizzard is coming through. The timing isn’t great. Nor are the temperatures, which promise to have wind-chill factors even hardy New Englanders, like us, know we ought to fear. I cancelled the reservation this morning.

What is Plan B?

There’s been a lot of talk about a long-anticipated, must-see movie in the theaters: Not much of a plot. The main character is a crazy eccentric. He grunts, snarls, roars. Neglects women. Sexually harasses them. I hear there’s a scene where he is lashed to a ship’s mast in a snowstorm!

I have to see it. It will get me all excited.

The movie is Mike Leigh’s, “Mr Turner”, about the English Romantic painter, J.M.W. Turner–a man who lived to obsess over capturing the power of the sea and the majesty of light, with paint.  Watching the film will inspire an imaginary excursion for my valentine and me into Victorian England, because one of the most romantic escapes we ever enjoyed was a trip to York, England. We arrived late at night when the medieval, walled city glowed by the light of a moon that rose above the York Minster and cast serene shadows of history into every snickleway. A light rain moved in, the moon disappeared, and so did we–into the pubs, into the Roman ruins, into the medieval chambers of dark lives, into the Victorian gloominess of slave trading histories, poverty, and the sumptuous brilliance of ordinary people.

Ordinary people! I love people who are ordinary and self-taught.

After we see the movie, we’ll find a place to have a drink and discuss. I’ll remember college and my first art history teacher–a short woman with hair spun into drifts onto the top of her head. She swayed like a drunken schoolmarm the day she began to talk about J.M.W. Turner. Listening to her, I feared the hair tower would come crashing off her head and, like a woman at a Jim Morrison concert, she might remove all her clothes, climb onto the stage of her desk, and leap right through the screen on the wall where she flashed slides of Turner’s paintings. I left class that day energized: “How can I get art to do that for me?”

My valentine and I will stare into each other’s ordinary eyes over our drinks and tell more stories and prattle on about how ordinary we are. We love to do this–go see great works of art and then come crashing down to earth together, like falling stars, over how ordinary we are.

A few weeks ago, we were at MoMA to see a Matisse show. After that show, we went to visit, in another gallery, everyone’s favorite: Van Gogh’s The Starry Night: I get as close as I can to these kinds of passionate paintings. I want to roll around in every brush stroke. It’s so arousing. I practically want to lick the painting. Only when I’m tied up and handcuffed is it safe for me to continue moving through the galleries.  It’s best to put a gag over my mouth, too, and perhaps a leash on me. But–I’ll struggle if anyone tries to cover my eyes. I have anxiety issues and can’t deal with being blindfolded.

*****

The over-50 crowd, the born-to-be ordinary people, (like my valentine and me), can become desperate with the expectations of Valentine’s Day. Some of us have been married forever. To the same person. More than twenty five years of being married to the same person. AND–before we got married, some of us dated forever.

How does anyone get aroused on Valentine’s Day with a lover you’ve had forever and ever? Books? Movies? Excursions to the edges of society, the underworlds of desire, the forbidden behaviors of good Catholics?

We’ll keep holding hands in the art museums and sitting close together at the movies. (BIG screen, letting the full effect of the film seduce us.)

Then return to our ordinary house. Where our own starry, starry love story lives.

We’ll stand next to it, roll around in it, lick it.

And let every brilliant, dreamy part consume us.