dear Dolphie, I love you. Please be my valentine forever. If you build me a
house I will happily live in it with you and our little Dolphies and Dolphinas.
And every time you build another building you will bring me yellow roses and
white chocolate and we will drink dark red wine with our vegetarian dinner. We
will send the children off to bed early and then we will giggle a lot on the
front sofa just like my Mommy and Daddy do when he has sold another VW. Ooops,
here comes teacher Old Scowly Face. I'll give this to you at recess. Your
friend, Theodora
From: Robin Carlsen
To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, April 4, 2013 10:24 PM
Subject: [FairfieldLife] HITLER'S VALENTINE
Robin:I think you would like to send Hitler a Valentine's Card and make
everything all
right again.
Share: Perhaps if someone had sent Hitler a valentine, he would have become a
happy architect.
Robin: If you said this ironically then you have essentially defied my analysis
of you--or at least in coming up with this response (assuming, again, that it
is ironic) you have proven to me you can resist your primary tendency
(sentimentality = a failure of real feeling). If, however--you must tell me
which it is, dear Share,--you meant this non-ironically, then you have
demonstrated just how true my essential idea of you is, dear Share.
So, either way I win. Because if you meant it in a deliberately ironic way,
then you have jumped out of your mould and have said something easily as good
as anything I could have said. And if you meant it sincerely (really believing
in the truth of what you say here; namely, that the course of history could
have been changed by one valentine) then you have rendered my last three posts
to you superfluous.
I won't ask you to clarify whether you were being ironic or not, Share; I will
just pray that if you were serious you will see that what you have said means
you have knocked yourself out with one roundhouse to the brain. And I wonder
whether you will ever get up off the canvas.
That said, I have to contemplate that the joke is on me; and in that case I
declare you the victor here. It is that good, your self-mockery--and in a way
you are making fun of me brilliantly.
Roger I believe had less of a problem in facing what is there (as he had to
today) than did Adolph--but then, if all it would have taken was one valentine,
then perhaps God thought Hitler was just one valentine short of going to heaven.
Thank you for writing with the intention to do your best, Share. It was pretty
good, all things considered.
But the motive for Hitler's valentine: on that hangs a fearful judgment!