Grand gestures just make you feel good; they don’t change strong minds
I had an email from a close friend. We were close enough once to be engaged. That was over thirty years ago. She wrote on the anniversary of her husband’s death last year. She grieves still. I marvel at the journey that took us from lovers to middle-aged friends sharing tales of grief.
We first met on a vineyard near Bordeaux. She turned up in the company of a female friend after I had been working there for a couple of months. Spring had arrived and there was a lot of work to do to make the vines ready for the rapid growth that would see them ready for harvest at the end of summer. The work was hard and two more pairs of hands were welcome.
She had a boyfriend in Paris to whom she wrote after a week to tell him that their relationship was over. He surprised us by arriving at the vineyard to try to persuade her to leave with him.
On the second day of his visit — and after I had spent a night alone worrying about my new girlfriend’s decision — I was mowing the field in which the new sheep were to be set loose when I saw what I hoped were the ex-lovers walk from the barn and climb a stack of hay to watch me at work.
The owner of the vineyard had suffered a heart attack shortly before I arrived and was unable — on doctor’s orders — to drive the two old tractors. For two months, therefore, I had developed a certain expertise not only in driving these sometimes temperamental machines but also at manipulating the tools we often attached behind for work in the fields and on the vineyards themselves.
And so I cut a giant heart into the long grass of the field I was supposed to be mowing. Well, what I did was mow the field from the outside, leaving a heart at the centre. I did it that way so it could look like accidental just in case the spurned lover looked across at the field. This seemed unlikely as he was obviously focused on making his point. From the tractor it looked like he hadn’t cast a glance towards the field since they had climbed the haystack.
I made my petty point and circled the heart for as long as I could before finally cutting it down and finishing my job. I only hoped that my new love had noted the gesture and, perhaps, let it sway her decision.
When I came in for dinner that evening, the spurned Parisian lover was gone.
In bed that night I asked if my gesture had made a difference. (I needed to know things like that back then. This could be one of the reasons we’re sending emails to each other now rather than talking across the dinner table.) She told me she hadn’t seen the heart. In fact, she made the point forcefully that she had made the decision without the need for cheesy interventions from me.
I think those were her exact words. Cheesy interventions. I didn’t explain to her just how much effort it took to shape a field with a mower tacked on the back of an old tractor.
I was, in fact, happy to accept the rebuke; ignored heart of grass or not, the only result of hurt feelings would be to sabotage the moment and, perhaps, the future.
