The spread

Since our first together, Amber tends to do grand things for Valentine's Day. One year, she turned our living room into a pillow fort so we could camp out in February. Another, she planned an Asian lunch involving sushi and mochi that she made herself, sitting on pillows on the floor, watching bad Japanese movies. She wore a Qipao blouse and had her hair up. A few years ago, she planned a carnival, involving homemade corndogs and games with prizes, that no one else could attend owning to a sudden blizzard.

Her Valentine's Day is one of the things I most look forward to each year. Last year, she could not, because she was too busy with classes. She does have to focus on things that involve her one day graduating over my glee at mochi and hobo stew.

This year I was not so generous in permitting her to skip it. I asked her days before what her plans were. She said that she didn't have them. I gave her a look, an "okay, but could you do a little something so I could say we did?"

Then she decided to have a tea party.

In short order, had three different types of sandwiches - peanut butter and jelly, egg salad, and chicken salad - on two types of bread, two scones, three cookies, two little cherry cakes (much too much cherry, much too little cake), and vanilla wafer sticks. It is too much food for two people, and Amber says as much. She had hoped that other people would come. By this, she means Kristina, who is mourning the death of her cat this weekend and would not be helped much by our sugar.

Amber tells our smart speaker to play tea party music. It obliges with tinkly pianos and muted violins that befit the occasion.

Nights ago, I had a dream that new friends surrounded me. I couldn't recognize any of them, but I knew that we had recently become acquainted and then became close. We gathered in an art gallery after hours, sharing a meal.

I woke up and knowing that I'd been around so many new, caring people warmed me. Then I had that daunting stickiness that none of these people existed outside my head.

Having a tea party with my cute wife is the opposite of a burden, but the amount of food we have left over brings starkly to mind how much cozier this could have been. It was a sweet Valentine's Day but we envisioned what it could have been, hours drinking tea and picking over sweets while getting deep into meandering conversations with one or more friends.

I tell Amber that, in my learned analysis, our ideal friend would live a seven-minute walk from us. Assuming that they had the tact to call in advance (which our ideal friend, of course, would), I would have enough time to clean up the apartment and get dressed. If they were any closer than seven minutes and paid a visit, they might catch me undressed or at least looking sloppy, the apartment's state too raw for public consumption.

Amber says that our ideal friend could be closer, as close as in our development. She fears less the knock on the front door when clad only in a bathrobe.

I want big meals with friends to be a fixture of my life. The week prior, Kristina came over. While Amber subjected her to further episodes of Hannibal, I made my beloved women lemon garlic salmon and rice. Kristina brought over vegetarian chili she had made. I assured her that she was always welcome for dinner as long as she gave me an hour's notice and that I would be keen to make any recipe she wanted to try to spice up my repertoire. I always make too much food anyway and then spend days eating it for lunch or freezing it. I might as well fill her belly. Food for loved ones is always more delicious than the food I make for myself anyway.

Some people in our lives seem to feel that our home in Red Hook, humble and pet-occupied that it is, is not worth the drive. If I still lived in my last apartment and had this invitation, I would deign to visit my Red Hook friends infrequently, though more depending on the food offered to me. I will travel more miles for teriyaki salmon or homemade pizza than takeout.

I hoped that, by this point in my life, I would have a large group of friends that would drop by. On the television, neighbors burst in upon friends, barely bothering to knock. Or best friends are reliably in the basement, a sixpack at the ready.

Amber and I had Daniel for years, who would come over on Thursdays to record a podcast and have dinner. No one stepped in to replace him. I don't think anyone could, but it would be nice if they had tried.

I'm not searching as much as I once did. I went to that board game night last month. I will go through it again in March in hopes of seeing new people, or old people whom I want to know better. Being single made the acquisition of friends so much easier, as there was always the threat of kissing to use as bait. (Of course, I would never want to be single again. I adore Amber. She threw me a tea party. You can't get much better than that.)

As we put away the food left over from our tea party -- against Amber's wishes (she feels that the sweets should be left out until we eat them all or they becomes stale) -- I find it melancholy that someone for whom we care did not absorb these excess calories in our stead.

Given the pastoral nature implicit in Red Hook, finding such friends might be more residential luck than personal effort. Simply put, there is no one within seven minutes' walk looking for our regular potluck, at least that I have encountered. Maybe this is our pickiness -- or mine in specific, as Amber feels this communal desire more dully, if at all. Having an open invitation is something extended currently only to the dislocated Daniel and the demur Kristina, the latter who seems to feel she may be imposing on our hospitality no matter how ardently we tell her otherwise. Our home, after all, is ours and can only permit a few honored guests before it would feel less ours.

I grew up in a house that was often overfull. Throughout my childhood, my mother babysat for neighbors. Then, my older brother populated his room and backyard with stoner teens. I rarely wanted for company. Given that I chewed through a book or more a week in the era before fast internet, I would have preferred a respite from company more often than I received it.

Few people that we have encountered in the last few years have stuck, but I've practiced my nonattachment. They did not stick because they were not meant to. There is nothing wrong with that. Not everyone is looking for or appropriate for our friendship. Even though they might have been once, it was not now. We did not meet at the right time.

My friend Melissa, with whom I only chat online about her romantic missteps, might be a closer friend if she was literally closer. She was years ago, but I did not know her then. Instead, we are close to penpal confessors.

Likewise, I enjoy the conversation I have with Melanie. I will love her like family as long as I live, but I have not seen her in six years or heard her voice in two.

If she was within an hour's drive, I expect we would be bosom chums, but that is unlikely to occur.

I get what I get. An overly pastried Valentine's Day tea party planned by my beloved wife is hardly the worst concession prize. Amber cannot be my everything, but she is enough that I will never be lonely. I would rather be with Amber and no one else than with anyone else and not Amber.

Soon in Xenology: Magical thinking and witchcraft.

last watched: Bojack Horseman
reading: American Cosmic