The best Valentine's story (re: comments)

There is one other important Valentine memory that I left out in "Hoping for a Letter from St. Valentine."  It is amazing what becoming hardened to social realities will do to one's memory.

One year, in high school, the student council was selling roses that people could buy for another student to express their feelings with either a white, pink or red flower.

My dear sister Charlotte, who knew that neither of us were going to get a rose from anyone, bought one for me. I think it was $2--that's in 1979 dollars. For her, that meant one day without hot lunch. It was so powerfully dear. It speaks to the connection we have that shows why she is still my best friend.

Of course, I was too big of a kid (boy) to cry--and we had enough other stuff to cry about in those days, hidden tears, but it strikes me with that emotion, today.

Thanks Barbara and Valerie P. for sharing your Valentine's stories and reminding me.

Also, here is some Valentine's Day trivia via MythBusters and thanks to Esther:

If you want to profess your undying love to your sweetheart, it's best to stick to red roses, lest she be versed in the language of flowers. Yellow roses signify friendship, dark pink roses express gratitude, and white roses are a sign of purity and reverence -- not necessarily appropriate sentiments for Valentine's Day.

There were several St. Valentines, all of which might claim influence on today's holiday. One was a priest in Rome, the second a bishop of Interamna (modern Terni, in Italy), and the third was in Africa. Little is known about any of these men. While it is possible that both of the Italian saints are meant to honored on Feb. 14, it is unclear which one, if any, inspired the romantic flavor of Saint Valentine's Day.

There are many legends about Saint Valentine -- secretly marrying young lovers, sending love notes -- but none of them can be substantiated. There were at least three different saints named Valentine, and very little is known about any of them. The church established a feast day for St. Valentine on Feb. 14 in order to "Christianize" Lupercalia, a pagan fertility festival celebrated by the ancient Romans on Feb. 15, during which men and women were paired off through a lottery. Although these pairings often led to marriage, the church did not approve and put a stop to it, but the association of the holiday with love and mating stuck.

It was also once commonly believed that Feb. 14 marked the beginning of the mating season for birds, adding to the romance of the date.

Hoping for a Letter from St. Valentine

I used to hate Valentine's Day. Did I say “hate?” How about quietly absorbing barbs of hostility? Maybe they were just misfired arrows of cupid that are as likely to be fired out of hate, missing their mark. They were not intended for me, but I was injured by the careless volley of arrows.

The one fortune cookie message I remember from all the cookies I have cracked said this: A good friend is a gift that one gives one's self. I am not so sure the same can be said for falling in love, hence the cupid analogy, but it might be healthy to adopt that mental construct.

Regardless of the construct I choose, it can be said that I have spent many Valentine's Days, and a good portion of other parts of my life, being neither a recipient nor giver of that gift. It was not that I did not have the desire, but, depending on your philosophy or construct, I was not sufficiently desired—by myself or anyone else. And I hated Valentine's Day.

Many years past the trauma of grade school Valentines in the cereal box, the holiday became one of heightened loneliness. It was one thing not to be able to afford a lot of the goodies that conveyed the evolved meaning of Valentine's Day and the kind of love that seemed to count. It was bad enough to not have anyone to whom to give them.

Yes, I used to HATE HATE HATE Valentine's Day, for a lot of reasons.  It has been a long journey to get to a place where it is a benign celebration of recognition and to let it give me a space where I can just get the designated space to acknowledge my relationships, with my son, at times a couple of healthy, unambiguous  friendships, and maybe two or just one relationship I've had. 

I know my spin-off emotions from my bad experience was as damaging to the good spaces others have had around it.  Even now, I can see that it is an institution that is charged with mutual and unmutual sexual exploitation, just plain exploitation. We still live with the expectation that people will measure the significance of love based on the amount of money they spend on their object of desire. Most persistently for me, it has been a reminder that so many people were into the day, had objects of at least manufactured desire, and that it was a game that I largely did not get to play. 

The first thing that happened that allowed me to at least participate in uttering the word "Valentine" was finding out that St. Valentine was a noted, prolific letter writer. When I was in graduate school and for a while after, I too was a prolific letter writer. I would celebrate that around the holiday rather than the other crap. 

Many years later,one of the sweetest things that happened around Valentine's Day was getting a ficus from Ginger.  This was long before there was an inkling, in my mind, that anything romantic would ever happen between us. Her gift was a very kind gesture from a friend: it was so sweet. 

The gesture was also profoundly symbolic of the fleeting hints of romance that visited our friendship in later days: not just the giving, but the vehicle of demonstrating affection.  A ficus? 

A ficus is very, very hard to take care of.  I have no green thumb.  It started to fade.  I tried keeping it up, but... well, it's a ficus.  It's end came when I went away for a week and left my brother Michael to take care of it.  When I came back, it was done for.  It was a ficus.  It should have been a sign to me of what she was capable of in love and relationship. 

And I did recognize that getting this ficus wasn't much different than the common practices of the living institution. Flowers and chocolate—those are the currency of love too often.  But flowers are dead.  They are cut and are not sustainable expressions.  They look fantastic for a while, but they whither and die.  Die soon. 

Chocolate does not provide nourishment.   Sugar and caffeine.  It won't make us strong.  It won't do much if we have it in any quantity that will fill our stomachs that won't wind us up being very unhealthy.

Flowers and chocolate just being two of the items along the continuum of more expensive items and some very unfortunate expectations that have taught us to believe that love is a function and measure of what we buy.

So, I've been trying to build something different around the holiday.  It has not been a good one for a lot of us.  Honestly, for the past 30 years, with the exception of a couple, it has been a relief that I did not have anyone for whom to perform such obligations.  Secretly, though, being left out dug into my heart.

I don't know how this Valentine's Day will turn out. It has to be a balance between my highfalutin moral objections and taking the excuse to express some joy. The day is arbitrary,  but at the same time,  my reaction against it is just as contrived and maybe I should not let it keep me from taking and benefiting from one of those social goods that is rightfully mine. I have some Valentines to write and some people who should get them. Time to pull out the cereal box.

Holiday Lessons from a Tape Recorder

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I could give you a lot of reasons why, and maybe I can't share all of them here, but one of the major reasons is that it is not Christmas.

For most adults, the winter holiday season is one of stress, obligation and financial compromise. We think it's simple for kids, but it can be even more complicated, as I honestly recall some of my childhood experiences. I also see holidays becoming more difficult in the lives of a lot of kids, given what they are going through today. What lesson should we learn from all of this? There are plenty, but we have not been such great students of life on this matter.

I learned one lesson the Christmas when I was 11. For some reason, I earnestly wanted a tape recorder. I am not sure why. There is not a whole lot one can do with a tape recorder, but record sound, and I am still not ingenious enough to understand the art of (or reason for) identifying and capturing sounds. It is enough to say that the technology was not as common-place as it is today, though not terribly inaccessible.

That Christmas, I got the tape recorder. I found it under the tree, unwrapped it with appropriate haste and recklessness, and marveled for a moment, or two—or maybe three. What followed in the next several hours were a series of lessons unfolded that, to this day, mark my understanding of the Christmas holiday, myself, and how I prefer to celebrate—or not.

The first lesson I learned was one that I should have taken to in all the previous years of Christmases: that the shine and allure of just about any gift will lose its luster soon after opening—if not after a few days of play. After a few times of playing my voice back, I realized that even that odd phenomenon was not as exciting and compelling as the thrill of finding and opening gifts under the tree—which my other siblings were still doing.

You have to remember that back then, tape recorders were expensive. While my parents would indulge in the thrill of seeing their kids open gifts they wanted with glee on Christmas morning, they also were frugal enough to not overindulge their children, nor spend so much more on one child to the point that it would be financially compromising or even disadvantageous to grant so many wishes. I don't think we even need to mention the tendency to develop undesirable orientations toward materialistic priorities or the displacement of the most important focus of the holiday.

Tape recorders cost a lot back then. Besides the pajamas, socks and mittens, the tape recorder was all I received for Christmas. My eye darted from gift to gift under the tree until I realized that all of the presents had someone else's name on them. Was there nothing more?

I began to feel sorry from myself. I think I sat for a while, on one of the living room chairs, quiet with my long fingers lightly pressing the buttons of the tape recorder. Then, a moment of self-consciousness overcame me, and my pity turned to a shade of shame.

Somehow, my 11-year-old self came to realize in that instant the shallowness and selfishness of my attitude. I realized the total inappropriateness of my disposition and misplaced value on the season.

I realized that I had even misplaced the value of the fact that our family was there, at home, all together, warm with a fire in the fireplace, on a very cold mid-western December morning. I don't think I could articulated it so well then. I just knew there was something wrong, something about which I could feel some shame, something wrong with feeling that I was getting less when, by any decent set of values, I should have been counting my blessings.

I do not know what I asked for the next year. I do not think I looked at the JCPenny and Sears catalogs with as much the same allure. I was different for the experience.

I was different in other ways. I was in junior high, on the verge of my first real crush, living with uncertain footing, no longer being among the Big Men on Campus of the 6^th grade. I gave up trick-or-treating. I was trying to convince the basketball coach that it was okay for me to play hockey as well—and miss basketball games in order to go to hockey practice.

Still, I have to say, the lesson took. I approach Christmas morning with the anticipation of seeing loved ones and sharing a wonderful dinner later in the day (and maybe a football game playing on the television in the background), much like Thanksgiving. I cannot say, even though I have not a lot of material wealth, I have been cured of materialistic tendencies. But I really do not care what is under the tree nearly as much as I care about who is gathered around it.

It was a lesson much harder learned but equally valuable as when my father told me the truth about Santa Claus. (More on that later, too.) When I finally convinced my mom that we should stop exchanging material presents (a rule that she likes to break), Christmas became a much more enjoyable holiday. (We still make sure kids get presents. Not sure what the impact of that is on them—a distraction from the Christ story, from the importance of family, the joy of having at least one day off—if not two weeks at the end of the year: A day or two week to not leave the house and admire those pajamas that grandma sent!)

So I am anticipating the days of Christmas. For only the second time in almost five decades, we will be missing one person around the tree from our six-member immediate family, which is quite a record. (Aunt/Sister Jennifer will be with in-laws.) We have been spared many of the realities of life beyond geography, in-laws and the burdens of each that make it difficult if not impossible for a lot of families to spend holidays together.

I will watch my child play with his cousins. I will see the contentment of my parents at having their grandchildren happy in their home. I will have a great meal (if my stomach decides to start cooperating by then). I will be around people I love. And maybe I will get a present: I think it will be socks. Thanks, mom and dad.