Chinook
by George Hosier II  - July 12

Hopeless Romantic

I’ll never understand women. How do they determine what is romantic and what isn’t? They’ll go swoony-headed and get starry-eyed over some guy from Hollywood that they have never met, who is on his sixty-third marriage and who has a guest suite at the drug rehab center, but if I try to emulate him, my wife knocks me swoony-headed and makes me see stars! How does that work?

I’ve spent hours trying to analyze these movie heroes, and what it is that pushes the buttons of the gentler sex, but the secret eludes me. Several times I thought I had happened upon the answer, but based on my wife’s reaction, I obviously am overlooking a critical component.

My first hypothesis was that the degree of a man’s charm is directly proportional to his ability to flourish a sword. Whether “Pirates of the Caribbean”, or “Kingdom of Heaven”, or “Lord of the Rings”, it seems that the guys who succeed in making my wife go misty eyed are constantly drawing a nicked blade from a scabbard with a musical “Sschiiiing” and using it to disassemble somebody sporting a face full of hideous prosthetics. This is all executed with flawlessly timed choreography of course.

At first I assumed that I could create the same effect with a little improvisation. Therefore, one hot day as I happened to be chopping brush with my favorite military surplus machete, I noticed my wife approaching with a cold glass of lemonade. Touched by her gesture of compassion, I thought I would fan the old conjugal embers with a bit of romance. In my best Errol Flynn impersonation, (that’s an antique version of Orlando Bloom, for my young readers) I did a spry balestra followed by a feint with my machete, while intoning, “avant-garde, villain! Prepare to taste my steel!”

Somehow, during my balestra, a snarl of wild rose bushes snagged my ankle requiring me to modify my act on the fly to include tumbling, juggling, and sword swallowing in my repertoire. I was certain that such a stellar performance was at least good for a smile and a peck on the cheek. Alas, my audience proved to be a cynical lot, expressing her disapproval by first dashing lemonade all over me, then bursting into tears and berating me soundly.

“George Martin Hosier! What on earth are you doing? Now you made me waste a perfectly good glass of lemonade! And you could have poked my eye out!” She critiqued my performance for several more paragraphs which I will omit, since the balance seemed to consist of redundant variations on the same theme. The exception being something that she shot over her shoulder as she headed back from whence she came: “Oh, by the way, D’Artagnan, the term is ‘En Garde’, not ‘avant-garde’!”

I was entirely nonplussed. Obviously she had completely missed the point. I wasn’t going for the D’Artagnan look at all. I was also positive that she was wrong about the fencing term, so I looked it up in the dictionary. Evidently, avant-garde “represents a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm, or the status quo...” That’s close enough for me. I don’t know why she needs to get so technical.

I decided that the problem was my sword. It just didn’t look the part, so for our anniversary I secretly ordered a $450.00 battle ready medieval broadsword replica from some armory in Toledo Spain. The advertisement said they hand forge the things using fourteenth century technology. I could hardly wait until the special day to give it to her. I sat on the edge of the seat as she opened it, watchig for the sparkle to ignite in her eyes and the smile of joy to leap to her lips.

It didn’t. She stared at it blankly, and slowly her face kind of crumpled. Then she saw the price tag. For a second, I hoped that those were tears of happiness that began spurting all over my...I mean...our new sword. I guess they weren’t. I slept in the doghouse that night, pondering where I had gone wrong. About 4:30 in the morning it struck me. It wasn’t Damascus steel!

Well, tears or no tears, I wasn’t about to shell out another thousand bucks to order a Damascus sword. If 220 stainless wasn’t good enough for her, I was just going to have to figure out some alternative techniques for romancing her. I began to analyze the movie heroes again.

After some pondering, my hypothesis acquired another element. It occurred to me that these romantic Hollywood types were forever galloping around on horseback. Of course! It was so obvious now! At the end of the movie, didn’t the hero always ride off into the sunset with his heroine cuddling up in the saddle with him? Clearly, this is why my wife was always out in the pasture messing around with her horses. She was waiting for me to become her knight in shining armor.

I knew what to do. The next time my wife announced that she was going out to work Stasia, the mare she is just breaking to ride, I set my plan in motion. Rummaging among my wife’s pots and pans cupboard I unearthed an approximately head-sized stainless steel colander with handles that accepted bungee cord hooks nicely. I placed the improvised helmet on my head, securing it by running the bungees under my chin. An aluminum turkey-roasting pan made a passable breastplate, and I drafted some hockey goalie shin guards for greaves.

The aforementioned beautiful anniversary sword would have smartly completed my ensemble, but my wife had insisted that I send it back to Toledo, so I decided to go with a lance instead. A hoe from the tool shed seemed just the ticket. Clasping it in my right hand and a galvanized trash can lid shield in the left, I sallied nobly forth on a quest of honor to win my lady’s heart.

I’ve noticed that women like to be surprised with romantic gestures, so I skirted the edge of the field, carefully keeping out of sight. Frustratingly, my armor was inclined to clank, making it more difficult to keep from being heard than it was to keep from being seen. However, at length I was able to arrive undetected at the position closest to where wife and horse were doing whatever it was that they were doing. I now had about thirty yards of open field to cross in order to reach the spot where they stood with their backs to me. Holding my armor snugly at all the clanky spots, I broke from the bushes and sprinted toward them.

I remembered my wife gushing in admiration of the hero in an old cowboy flick who, in his haste to apprehend the dadgum rustlers had vaulted onto his standing horse from behind, by planting his hands on the horse’s rump and sort of leap-frogging into the saddle. The horse had then thundered off into the sagebrush to carry the white-hatted hero to glory and the smoochy gratitude of some blonde schoolteacher chick in a gingham dress. I determined to re-enact that scene.

At about 15 feet, it became necessary for me to let go of my clanky spots in order to prepare my hands for placement on the horse’s rump. I would have waited until the last minute, but I had a lance and a shield to factor into the maneuver. Well, the horse heard me begin to clank, and she must have watched the wrong movie, because she elected to light out without me. When my trajectory intersected the spot where the rump was supposed to be, I had nothing to plant my hands on except a cloud of dust, so I did a beautiful pratfall instead, like a bandito who has been shot from a roof by a rangy, hard-bitten, mysterious stranger. It would have been thrilling stuff if I hadn’t broken my hoe...with my face.

The romantic mood was further muted by the fact that the lead rope had somehow gotten wrapped around my wife’s wrist when Stasia decided to depart. So, while I was languishing in pain, awaiting to be nursed back to strength while reclining in the lap of my beloved, she was off gallivanting around the field with the horse.

When they got back, she had been crying again. I attempted too cheer her up by offering to demonstrate my best jousting impression but she declined. In fact, she was so unsociable as to demand that I put her horse back in the barn for her, while she went in the house to take a nap. It was really quite appalling!

After that experience, I have pretty much given up trying to discover the key to the iron-clad and spiked portcullis of a woman’s affections. If I ever do drum up the courage to try again, though, I think I know what I have been missing. I don’t know why I never thought of it before, but every time my wife sees a movie where the leading man is wearing a kilt, she soaks a half a box of Kleenexes. Yeah, a kilt! That should do the trick.
 

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