Happy Valentine's
Statehood and romance out west
Happy Valentine’s Day from your favorite Arizona Progressive
Valentine’s Day is also Statehood Day for Arizona, the state that Jon Stewart once referred to as the “meth lab of democracy “. How do MAGA Republicans celebrate statehood? By stating their love for Trump and donning their hoods.
I’m ready for Valentine’s Day. I have always followed the advice of the great Doctor Guillotine who once remarked to King Louis, “Think ahead.”
I’ll never forget the year I forgot to make Valentine’s Day dinner reservations and I also forgot to order a giant “Tell-her-you-love-her-with-flowers-that-will-die” bouquet and to make matters worse I completely forgot to hire the amazing Joe Bourne to sing “I wanna hold your hand” backed up by the entire UA marching Band. And I completely spaced on renting the Old Tucson Stage Coach for the ride up “A” Mountain and then I learned it was way too late to pick her up as her knight-in-shining armor because the danged Arizona Historical Society won’t let anyone borrow their conquistador’s armor even if you promise to bring it right back.
That was then this is now. This year I have the best Valentine’s planned for my Ellen.
After a sumptuous feast by candlelight at Pat’s Chil Dogs I’ll drive us up to “A” Mountain where I’ll remind her the “A” stands for “Amor”. On her first date she claimed the “A” stood for “Abstinence”.
I’ll set the votive candle I “borrowed” from San Augustine’s Cathedral on the dashboard, light it with my barbecue lighter and then I’ll fire up the Barry White playlist recommended to me by a former Pima College Chancellor who gave it two thumbs up for romance.
And then I’ll present her with a gift of priceless vintage jewelry, a set of Captain Bob’s Sea Opals from the Tanque Verde Swap Meet, which I found at the St. Vincent’s Thrift Store.
Ah, mi amor. Ella me perdona todos los días. She forgives me every day.
This next story is a true Valentine’s story about two of my favorite people.
Aren’t you something
by David Fitzsimmons
Every Valentines Day the dame feigned surprise that the big palooka gave her the same box of chocolates every year. “For me? Well, aren’t you something.”
They met ten thousand moons ago at the Catalina Island Ballroom when the doll in question was a taxi dancer. A nickel-hopper. Ten lousy cents a dance. Spare a dime, soldier boy?
Private Romeo was out on the town alone that night when he hopped the ferry to the island. He had never cast his peepers on anything like the magnificent ballroom on Avalon Bay, a cavernous dance hall lit by a constellation of stars swimming around the room, sent spinning by giant mirrored balls suspended above the war weary cats swinging to the intoxicating boogie woogie wailing from the bandstand.
When Private Romeo’s eyes met his taxi dancer the poor sap saw the girl of his dreams. She saw ten cents. He marched up to her, pressed his dance ticket into her mitts and opened his arms. She stuffed the ticket into her bra. “Air Corps?”
“Yes, ma’am. I was at Pearl—“
She pressed her finger tip to soldier boy’s lips, hushing him. “Heard it all before, Gary Cooper.”
The band began the Beguine. She took his right hand and she gently set his left hand on her slim waist. Much to her relief Private Romeo could dance. There was something innocent about this galoot. She told him, “Nice dance moves, kid.”
She didn’t tell him she had two little boys, and they were just scraping by, living in a flophouse or that her father was a drunk and her stepfather had raped her or that she had hitchhiked from Rockaway at the height of the depression to San Francisco to share a room with a high school girlfriend who was a chorus girl who helped her get a job at a dancehall.
She didn’t tell him her first husband made bathtub gin, beat her and left her with a baby or that her second husband,a film flam artist, left as soon as she got pregnant, or that she wasn’t no dumb mug’s moll, or that she hated dancing with strangers but hey, mister, she needed the chump change to feed her babies. And as strangers went this lug didn’t have to scram, he was all right. Like no other lug she had ever met. Not the kind to hit a dame or get stinking drunk. A gentleman. For the first time in a million dances she rested her head on a man’s shoulder and closed her eyes.
He whispered he had been an altar boy and a boxer and that she was a ringer for Rita Hayworth and that no one could beat Harry James on the trumpet and that he was going to shoot Tojo himself.
He didn’t tell her he had crawled from the tenement slums of Manhattan or that his parents were buried in a pauper’s graveyard or that he grew up an orphan living on the streets of New York.
Or that he slept on the cold grey stone floors of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral bundled in rags behind a statue of Saint Andrew watching the headlights of the Model As and Tin Lizzies on 5th Avenue illuminate the stained glass windows above his head or that he stole from the poor box to buy food and smokes so he could kill the lice in his hair with lit cigarettes or that he was the Priest’s favorite altar boy because Prohibition was on and the kid was a lookout for rum runners and always had access to fine liquor for the good Fathers.
He wanted this doll to think he had class.
The next night the pug returned and bought three dollars worth of tickets. “I’m not going to let you go.” She looked straight into his headlamps and smiled. “Thirty dances? Well, aren’t you something?”
As they danced they poured their stories out into each other’s broken hearts.
“Tough times, chickadee.”
“Listen you lug, I ain’t a weak sister. And I ain’t no round heels. I ain’t no patsy.”
Private Romeo swung her around into his arms and stopped mid-dance to ask her a question he’d been practicing. “You got a fella?”
The next night, thirty dances later, Private Romeo gave his Juliet a gold ring with a chunk of ice on it.
He raised her sons as his own and together they added two more children to their family. She taught him how to read and in turn he taught her that, sure, sweet heart, there were good men in the world.
Every Valentines Day, until the final dance, my father would give her the same box of chocolates with exactly thirty chocolates inside.
“You got a fella?”
“For me? Well, aren’t you something.”
My late mother and father truly were something.
Links to stories I lovingly curated for you, my favorite Valentine
First, a savage indictment of the lily-livered lawmakers here who fear transparency. By my brilliant friend, Ist Amendment Attorney David Bodney. I swear he’s channeling Tom Paine: A scathing rebuke of our legislature's craven efforts to keep we, the people, in the dark
Water. Beware of the boondoggles. Conservation is the path. Armyourself with the facts:
Pumping Mississippi water is a pipe dream
Desalinization. Pouring salt in our water wounds.
My column on the subject. We have to laugh to keep from crying:
More laughter to keep from crying:
Get to know one of Arizona's wingnuttiest wingnuts
How I won my Ellen’s heart
It’s all true.
I was born under a Cottonwood in Sabino Creek and raised by a pack of wild coyotes. And as sure as buzzards fly it’s true that dynamite is my favorite vittle and yes, if Pecos Bill says he once saw me lasso a twister with a rattlesnake outside of Tombstone , well then, heck, it must be true. However I must say, contrary to what was written in the Bisbee Bugle, I never rode a dust devil over Texas Canyon, “like a bucking bronco”.
But, there’s one thing you can be certain of, amigo, San Pedro Dave is my name and I’m the fastest draw south of the Gila and this was going to be a Valentine’s Day that my girl, Easy on the Eyes Ellen, would never forget.
I’ll never forget the day I met my cholla blossom, my sweet Ellen. It was a Tuesday, in Tucson, in 1888 and I was in the Lost Dutchman Saloon wrasslin’ a mountain lion that accused me of cheatin’ at cards when she rode into town on the back of desert breeze. Every man froze because she was the prettiest mustang ever to grace the broken down corrals of our sorry hearts.
That night, with my heart beating like an Apache war drum, I vowed to the moon and stars she’d be mine, as soon as the last round up in Aravaipa was done.
And that would be Valentine’s Day.
On Valentines Day I sent her a herd of javelina dancing on top of a stampede of tumbling tumbleweeds, a hillside of golden poppies, and a rainbow I had wrangled in Willcox.
And then I gave my desert flower a Palomino named “Daisy”, so we could ride out to watch the sun set together.
She liked the saddle I made for her out of Gila Monster hides and the bridle straps I knitted out of Bobcat whiskers. She said they was danged beautiful.
I secretly rounded up a sweet choir of singing coyotes I trained them to sing harmonies, which is about as easy as barrel racing caballeros on javelinas. Coyotes are independent cusses, as independent as tumbleweeds. I promised them that I would ride up to the moon on the back of a buzzard, rope it, hogtie it and give it to them if they could melt Selena’s heart. They said they could.
As we rode along the canyon trail, my coyotes sang their hearts out on cue and once Ellen heard them bark “You are my sunshine”, like a sorrowful pack of Pasty Clines, she was mine.
At the pass we watched the sunset together on our horses. Selena said she wished that moment could last forever, so I lassoed the sun and held on to it as long as I could. It was hankerin’ to skedaddle south of the Tucson Mountains but I held on tight and the crimson, purple and gold hung in the sky until she’d had enough western splendor and was hankerin’ for grub.
I made us a campfire out of some lightning I had caught with my bare hands while chasing a thunderstorm over the Chiricauhuas.
I gave her a chaw of the world’s biggest beef jerky stick, which I won in Payson, Arizona, from a mountain man who couldn’t match my four aces. (The very same codger who taught me how to hypnotize grizzlies with eagle feathers.)
This was before I found out she was a vegetarian, but Easy on the Eyes Ellen, being an angel, kept it, and to this day she let’s tourists at our dude ranch see it for two bits a peek.
With the snap of my bullwhip the stars came out. I ordered her a full moon, and a crescent moon, at the same time, in the same sky, both moons at once. And a planet twinkling nearby. And there above us, I had spelled out her name across the sky, written in cursive with a constellation of stars. You could see it from the Rio Grande to to the Yukon. A lumberjack, a northerner named Bunyan, helped me out with that little chore.
I gave my valentine a ring made of silver and copper, with a boulder of turquoise set in the petrified heart of a lonesome dove. I told her by the light of the campfire she had lips as red as ocotillo blossoms and I kissed her and told her I loved her more than my horse “Rowdy”. I climbed up on “Rowdy”. I tugged his reins. I tipped my stetson in her direction as my stallion reared up on his back legs. As he pawed at the rising moons with his hooves I asked my desert flower the question.
“Hi yo, Valentine! Will you be mine?”
Lovely stories my friend. Facts and imagination flow together seamlessly. ❤️❤️👍🌵
Thank you for this lovely Valentine ♥️