A Little Girl Learns Lessons of Love From a True Romantic

True love. If it doesn’t kill you, it just makes you funnier. Just listen.

“This boy sent me a poem,” says the little red-haired girl.

“Which boy?” I ask.

“It said, ‘Roses are red, and your feet really stink,’ ” she says, then laughs.

“Which boy?” I ask again.

It is the first poem anyone has ever written her, and evidently it is a keeper.

She pictures the little boy as he wrote it, probably penning the first few words, then taking a break to get a drink or steal someone’s eraser, eventually returning to his desk and coming up with that fine closing line.

“And your feet really stink,” he wrote, then smiled to himself, knowing he got the words just right.

The little red-haired girl read it, and read it again, laughing a little harder each time, then thanked him for writing her such a nice poem.

The poem has special meaning to her, what with Valentine’s Day just around the corner. She cherishes every part of Valentine’s. The hearts. The cupids. The sour little candy that gets stuck in her teeth.

“Dad, I really like Valentine’s,” she says.

“You’ll get over it,” I say.

As we talk, she sits at the kitchen table, filling out valentines for her first-grade classmates. They are the kind of valentines you buy in a box, tiny cards with pictures of cartoon characters.

In addition to her signature, the little red-haired girl is making sure each one carries some personal message, a heartfelt little note that captures the essence of their relationship.

“I like the way you run,” she writes on one.

“You’re a good jump-roper,” she writes on another.

She pauses before writing each note, rubbing her nose with the palm of her hand, then leaning in close to the table the way the great writers do.

“Dad, how did you and Mom meet?” she says.

She asks me this every Valentine’s, how her mother and I met. There are several stories floating around, all of them pretty romantic, all of them filled with magic and adventure. And the little girl isn’t sure which one to believe.

“They met in prison,” my lovely and patient oldest daughter explains. “He was the guard, and she was the inmate.”

The little girl imagines how this might have happened, picturing her future mom and dad running across a prison yard as sirens blared, holding hands and dodging searchlights, before eventually escaping into the woods and making a life together on the lam.

“It was the best first date of all time,” her older sister says.

But the little girl isn’t convinced. To her, this prison story sounds too perfect. Too much like a fairy tale.

“Dad, how did you and Mommy meet?” she asks again.

“We were born married,” I say. “Can’t you tell?”

Born married. Even to a romantic like her, this sounds pretty bleak. To her, “Born Married” sounds like some sort of scary movie. You’re born, and then your first substantive thought is that you’re already married. Yikes.

“Born married?” she asks. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“I’d never kid a kid,” I say.

“Sure, Dad,” she says. “No one is ever born married.”

“Your mommy and I were,” I say. “We were just destined for each other, I guess.”

“That’s too bad,” she says.

The little red-haired girl returns to her valentines, convinced now that love isn’t just hard to find. It’s fickle. And pretty darned frightening.

And she still has so many questions. Hundreds of questions. Like how long does love last? Is it expensive? Why doesn’t Cupid just use a gun?

“Dad, can I ask you something?” she asks.

“Sure,” I say.

“How long does love last?”

She’s not certain her father is the right person to ask. If he was really born married, what does he know about love? But the only other person around now is her 12-year-old brother, who is in the bedroom playing his nose like a kazoo.

“Love usually lasts a few months,” I tell her. “In certain freak instances, it lasts a lifetime, like with moms and dads. And even then, not always. With love, there are no guarantees.”

She considers this a moment. It sounds pretty good. From what she can tell, love usually doesn’t last forever. But it can. Evidently, that’s what you have to watch out for.

“Thanks, Dad,” she says.

Happy Valentine’s.

* Chris Erskine’s column is published on Wednesdays. His e-mail address is chris.erskine@latimes.com.