I left my wife this past Sunday, Valentine’s Day, and went to the movies while she stayed at home, grading papers and watching the Olympics. This was acceptable behavior; I’m not particularly interested in ice skating or ski jumping, and after 27 years of marriage romance and love stay alive in the details.

Someone fills up the gas tank, someone takes the dog out, and someone on his way home from the movies stops and buys anything he can find at the store that contains the words “dark” and “chocolate,” including meat. A little thoughtfulness can go a long way, in other words, and cover any number of flaws, including hair loss. No mistakes were made on this day, then, except a slight one involving coconut.

I did make a Valentine’s Day mistake once, a long time ago, although this had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with bad judgment. It was in 1979, and already a 30-year-old reader is saying, Nope, can’t relate, sorry.
I understand; I’m a little stunned myself.

I was 20 years old on that particular Valentine’s Day, playing at being an adult. I’d left college the previous spring after my sophomore year, for reasons I can’t really remember.

I took a job in Phoenix, a graveyard shift, fooling around with primitive computers in a purely clerical way. I worked at night and slept during the day.

I had a 1973 Toyota Celica, a little car I loved. I had, that February, a new apartment, the first time I’d ever lived by myself. I also had a girlfriend, although I’m not sure I’ve prioritized these in the right order. Hard to say. I really loved that car.

I also had a friend who was a photographer, married to a former high school buddy. At someone’s suggestion, mine or hers, she posed me one day in their living room, guitar leaning on my shoulder, serious look on my face, scraggly beard and shaggy hair, jeans and no shoes, arty and poetic and pretentious.

The idea was that it would be a Valentine’s Day gift for my girlfriend, and if you’re wondering about the arrogance and ego involved in this I’ll just say I’m wondering too. The plan, I guess, involved her swooning, although no picture of me has ever had that effect on anyone.

On Feb. 14, 1979, then, I got off work at 6 a.m., drove to my friend’s house and woke her up, and retrieved my picture. I was starting a week of vacation, plenty of plans, and all I had to do was grab a few hours of sleep in my new apartment before starting.
Whoops. New address. Heading in the wrong direction. I made a quick course correction, a sudden left turn, and my day got interesting.

It was a fairly minor car accident, looking back, although I was on crutches for a couple of weeks, my Celica was totaled, I had a fair number of stitches and my shirt was soaked with blood. On the way home from the hospital, bandaged and splinted and sutured, and with a headache I cannot begin to describe, my mom driving, I suddenly got my priorities straightened out.

My mother, God love her, located the junkyard where they’d towed my poor car and managed to save my picture. I eventually gave it to my girlfriend that night, although somehow the romantic feeling was lost along with the blood.

My ex-girlfriend kept that picture for a couple of years, until (as I recall) her husband at the time decided to dispose of it for her. Can’t blame him for that. And this woman is now a grandmother, an accomplished professional, and I’m a little spot in her memory, as I should be.

I have a scar above my left eye, small but there if you look hard enough, and another on my right knee.

My friend eventually split up with his photographer wife, remarried and now lives in southern California. He sent me a note the other day, describing how he’d been sorting through boxes and made a discovery. Turns out photographers tend to make more than one print of even unremarkable pictures.

“Pictures are for people who can’t remember,” George Clooney’s character says in “Up In The Air,” and it struck me then that he was right, although not in the snotty way he meant. None of us can remember, not really, and as we store this fuzzy matter we confabulate and archive and highlight, and sometimes we’re just wrong, too. Pictures help.

I have this print now; it only tells me how I looked at a moment in time. The rest is recall, surely faulty, although I now also have a story. It’s a cool picture, everybody says so, sepia and professional, and it sits now on my wife’s piano. She seems charmed by it, if less enthusiastic about the backstory, so maybe we won’t show her this column.

On the other hand, a little dark chocolate goes a long way, and a picture is sometimes just a picture.