Hardly a Valentine’s Day goes by that my wife and I don’t reminisce about the first one we ever celebrated together. We had been dating just long enough to consider ourselves “an item” when February 14th rolled around. I made reservations at a romantic restaurant, bought her flowers and a lovely necklace. We planned to have a very special evening.
We arrived at the restaurant and were promptly seated. Before dinner we enjoyed a drink and made the kind of small talk that lovers make in a new relationship. She liked our secluded table. She loved the flowers. She raved about the necklace. The evening was turning out to be perfect. At least it was until we ordered dinner.
The house salad at this particular restaurant was served in a huge wooden bowl. Dressings and other condiments were served upon a matching hand-carved tray. The salad and the way it was presented made it one of the restaurant’s signature menu items. While I ordered more drinks for us, my new love began to fill her salad bowl. For some reason that we have yet to discern, when this elegant lady put the spring-loaded salad tongs back into the wooden bowl, she squeezed the handles together…
A few minutes passed as I finished my drink, she started to eat her salad and we chatted. All the while those tongs were slowly uncoiling, edging closer to the top of the bowl. Just as I was about to reach for them, the tongs sprang to life! They leaped from the wooden bowl, throwing lettuce, cucumbers, radishes and onions anywhere and everywhere. There was salad in our drinks, in our hair, on our clothes, on the table: we looked as though were we sitting in the midst of a huge salad buffet!
My embarrassed date wanted to hide under the table. I actually pulled a muscle in my neck trying not to laugh out loud. We received a smattering of applause from nearby tables as a small army of waiters and busboys surrounded us and went to work. Soon order was restored. We giggled our way through the remainder of our dinner without further fanfare then left quietly. It goes without saying, of course, that the romantic mood of the evening had been lost along the way.
This year will mark our 35th wedding anniversary. That means we have shared 38 of those special evenings together, none more memorable than the first. Each and every year since, when we go out to eat on Valentine’s Day, we always break into unstoppable, uncontrollable laughter when our waiter asks, “Would you two care for a salad?”