Amor de lejos

Valentine's Day was established for totally mercenary purposes. The whole pink-colored tale about the priest helping star-crossed lovers basically sugar coats what is in essence an often guilt-driven day of spending.

But it doesn't have to be about what things we get or give on this day. It's more about the loving we do for real and from afar.

My Valentine's Day started with a phone call from my 97-year-old abuela, who is nearly blind and deaf, but refuses to move into a home and walks through the darkened rooms of her large cement house by holding on to the walls, navigating with the help of her still prodigious memory. Like Ursula in García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, my grandmother is a force to be reckoned with, even as she nears a century of life, a lot of it spent in stubborn solitude after my abuelo died of cancer more than 30 years ago.

When my husband handed me the phone, she said: "Amor, amor, amor," in that high-pitched old abuela voice, warming my heart and giving me another taste of the unconditional and boundless love she has shown me throughout all of the years of my life.

She was on my list of special calls today, but she beat me to it, making sure she was the one to say amor first on this, the supposedly official holiday of love. She made me even more determined to pass it forward and I called my titi Bebi, whom I haven't talked to in too long a while.

She is my mother's aunt, sister to my abuela Hebe, who died some 20 years ago. When I was a small child, she and my tío José Enrique (the one of béisbol fame) took care of me countless times in their modest apartment in Santurce when my parents traveled or had other obligations. In my mind, I know their home by memory with its gray floor tiles, high ceilings and long double dark-wood doors, and the candle always burning at the end of the hallway in front of the lovely black-and-white picture of titi's dead sister, Edeligia.

Titi was delighted when I called her , miraculously remembering my name at the first try. She has this hilarious malady of calling us by the name of every other female member of the family before she remembers ours. Something that goes like this: "Ana Marie, Marielena, Roxanna, Norma..." and so on until she finally stumbles on our name.

After I answered all her questions about me and my husband, she started reminiscing about how I wouldn't eat the white rice she cooked, and how her sons, Papo and Eric, would tell on me while she was in the kitchen, scraping the delicious pegao from the caldero, a task she performed for decades at the same time each day. I don't remember ever refusing to eat white rice, which I absolutely crave, but I couldn't disagree with her when she said laughing: "You were always an ajentá," which loosely translates to mean that I was kind of willful.

She also recalled a picture of me that she took one day, when I was about four years old, and she'd curled my hair with gigantic pink rollers, something she loved to do (I think maybe I was sort of her play doll). I was hanging around the house in those oversized pink rollers and panties when she says I ran outside to play in the small patio, which they shared with the other residents in the building. Again, Papo and Eric told on me, yelling to her that I was outside in my underwear and rollers. She went after me and brought me inside with a scolding but I guess she couldn't resist and took that picture.

My abuela and my titi Bebi were the highlights of my Valentine's Day this year. Of course there was the nice dinner at home with my husband, and the love of always for my parents and for all those close to my heart.

But the icing on the cake was the getting and the giving of that amor de lejos that belongs to those who've loved us for as long as we have lived, and whom we will love for real and forever.