Date Specific

I'm embarrassed to say that I have a date on Valentine's Day. When so many other people are out there beating the romantic bushes for their own true love, I am happily ensconced here at home with the love of my life. But this was not always the case.
I was stood up once on Valentine's Day. I had screwed up enough courage to ask a girl out after years of sitting idly by and hoping that my dream girl would come and find me. That wasn't happening, so I called up a friend of a friend and asked if she would like to go out some time. "When?" was her response. A perfectly reasonable one, and suddenly I was making much more headway with the opposite sex than I had in years.
"How about next Friday?" Friday night was, in my estimation, date night and was probably the expected response. I should have guessed from the sound of her voice that I had made some mild miscalculation.
"Uh, sure."
We discussed logistics: dinner and a movie, when and where to pick her up. Looking forward to it, bye. It was only after I had hung up that I realized the date I had chosen was February 14. I started to panic, but then consoled myself just as quickly with the notion that if she had been willing to go out with me on Valentine's Day, I must really be on to something.
When that day came, I was finishing up my shift at the video store, and I was checking my watch and wondering if I had made the right choice when I pulled a shirt out of my closet that hadn't seen an iron since, well, I didn't own an iron. I was going through a stack of returns when my co-worker passed me the phone, "It's for you."
I didn't panic right away, but as I put the phone to my ear, I sensed a disturbance in the Force. "I don't think I can make it tonight," she told me.
For just a moment, I thought about arguing the point: Sure you can. It's no trouble at all. I'll pay for everything. It will be great. Instead, "Oh. I see."
"I'm really sorry. Maybe some other time."
There was no other time. I hung around the video store for a while longer that night and then went home. I had a TV dinner. It was pitiful and I didn't do much to mediate the experience. It fit in so very well with most of the other romantic interludes of my early adulthood. After a dating renaissance in my senior year in high school and a few years after that, things had cooled off considerably. Think "arctic." This was going to get me back into the game.
Instead, I sat in my living room in front of the Next Best Thing To Your Good Cooking. Now, almost twenty-five years after the fact, it still stings just a little bit, but it can't dull the giddy satisfaction I have with how things turned out. As it turns out, I was just saving myself.