Tales of a Valentine Kind

"What do you see when you look at me? "I see a girl. A pearl of a girl." My posting this week bridges the time including Valentine's Day. Two unusual love stories is what I give you. The first is of a scene in Central Park where I saw a grandmother help a boy about four climb onto the statue of Balto. Balto was the sled dog who "saved Nome" because, even though he was considered not a leader, managed to brave unearthly conditions to bring diphtheria antitoxin to Nome, Alaska. The details of the statue are so realistic that I'm sure the boy expected the dog to take off into the sky with rider on the back waving to his grandmother, "See you soon! Grammie!" I had the feeling the power and calm of the dog would become a part of the boy and in years to come would give him an unremembered source of optimism. This scene reminded me of another statue, this time with a girl climbing onto it. It was in the movie David and Lisa which I saw in 1962 so I may have some of the facts wrong but the love story is intact. David and Lisa are disturbed young people in a psychiatric ward or maybe it was a residential treatment center. David is terrified of being touched and obsessive over clocks. Lisa is a schizophrenic. When she is Lisa, she talks in rhymes. When she is Muriel, she is mute and writes on a chalk board. David befriends her by trying to speak to her in rhymes. The moment when she asks. "What do you see when you look at me?" and he replies, "I see a girl. A pearl of a girl" is so tender that I remember it clearly all these decades later. At one point, Lisa runs away and David knows where she must be. He finds her in the comfort of a statue they had seen (on a field trip?) curled up and waiting. In times of of shifting loyalties, betrayals, "the rug pulled out from under us," financial chaos, and grief, it is good to connect to stories of courage, to statues of lastingness, the happy endings and the enduring happily ever afters.

...may the blessings of stalwart stone companions be yours...