The Days of Milk and Roses

Marie reminded me of this story, which I realized I haven't ever posted here. It is one of my favorite stories to tell on my sweet husband. It is from our years in Texas, while he was working on his PhD in Spanish Linguistics. When we arrived in Texas, we had two little boys in tow. When we left five years later, our fourth child was a month old. We lived in married student housing and lived off his graduate teaching assistantship, which came to about $700 a month. Even with adjustment for inflation, it wasn't much. And it certainly wasn't enough. We made do, though, mostly by finding fun things we could do that didn't cost anything at all. Gifts . . . well, gifts came mostly from Santa Claus (who at that time still looked an awful lot like my angel mother), or were handmade or otherwise inexpensive . . . well, no . . . free was more like it. We just did without a lot of stuff.

John is a romantic guy. He's all about the sports and the jock stuff and "arrrg, arrrg, arrrg," and all, but he's sentimental and thoughtful -- which is why I picked him. He watches chick flicks with me, and cries in all the right places -- we don't even pretend to be embarrassed about it -- we just hand each other kleenex and smile and know better than to try to talk until we can control ourselves. He has written me some poetry, and a very lovely song, and he has a way of saying just the right thing at the right time with the perfect balance of manliness and disarming boyish sincerity . . . I think he's adorable.

I think it was in 1985, but it could have been '87 when our story took place. I was pregnant at the time, so it was with either Marie or Steven. John usually left for campus on the first shuttle bus of the day, around 7 a.m., and returned on the last shuttle of the day, around 11 p.m. Yeah. Grad school was way fun. On Fridays, he would come home early and we would toss the kids in the car and go somewhere -- for a drive, to the mall, it didn't matter. We just had to get away from our daily routine, and that's what our Fridays were for. I think this must have been a Friday, because I was in the kitchen when he came home, which means it wasn't after 11 o'clock. He had in his hands two gallons of milk.

Back in those days, we went through a lot of milk at our house -- around 6 gallons a week. I can't imagine buying that much milk now, but little kids like milk, and we bought a lot of it. On that particular day, we were out of the stuff, and I had been waiting for him to get home so I could run to the store and get some without having to take all the kids with me. Not that I didn't often haul them along, but "Make Way for Ducklings," as cute a tale as it is, makes for very inefficient shopping.

John handed me the milk with a sad look on his face. "I stopped at the store to buy you some flowers today," he started. I cocked my head and looked at him a little funny. Flowers were definitely not in our budget. Anywhere. I was touched by the thought, though, and he continued,

"I had a few dollars left in my wallet, and I know I never bring you flowers, but I thought how nice it would be to do that, just for no reason at all, so I stopped at the grocery store and as I walked back to where the flowers are, I passed the dairy case and I remembered that we were out of milk, and I thought about how you probably hadn't had a chance to get to the store with the kids and all. I didn't have enough money to get milk AND flowers, so I just brought you the milk, but I wanted it to be the flowers. Can you pretend that they're flowers?"

This is the part where she leans in for a tender kiss and the screen fades to a discreet black.

I still believe that's the best present I ever received