Sometimes you just have to laugh .
. . The next writing prompt in the memoir
class I am taking is, of course on the theme of Valentines Day. And why wouldn’t it be? I really struggled
with this one. While trying to focus on good memories in the writing and
reading we do each week, this prompt was a challenge. So, after starting three
and deleting them I think I answered the challenge with some humor as well as staying
true to the actual events.
What do I do with this prompt?
Avoid it? Ignore it? Write something totally different? Something fun,
something warm and fuzzy? I am not even sure I have a warm and fuzzy thing to
write about Valentine’s Day.
Okay, I can
do this. I’ll treat it like a school essay assignment. Similar to, ‘what I did
over my summer vacation.’ Maybe I’ll surprise myself.
Maybe when I begin to think about why I hate
Valentines Days . . . no that word is too strong. I don’t really ‘hate it’ I
just never got to really be a participant in what it was meant to be.
Maybe I’ll start there.
Saint
Valentine's Day, commonly shortened to Valentine's Day, is a holiday
observed on February 14 honoring one or more early Christian martyrs named Saint
Valentine. It is traditionally a day on which lovers express their love for each other
by presenting flowers, offering confectionery,
and sending greeting cards (known as
"valentines"). The day first became associated with romantic love
in the circle of Geoffrey Chaucer in the High Middle
Ages, when the tradition of courtly love
flourished. It was first established by Pope Gelasius
I in 496 AD, and was later deleted from the General Roman Calendar of saints in 1969
by Pope Paul VI.
Modern Valentine's Day symbols include the heart-shaped
outline, doves, and the figure of the winged Cupid. Since the 19th
century, handwritten valentines have given way to mass-produced greeting
cards.
Well,
now that explains it. Or does it? Someone needed to tell the creator of those
heart-shaped, dove loving, winged cupids that Valentines Day for a pudgy girl in
third grade through her seventh grade would turn into elephants balancing on
their trunks. Happy Hippos in not so little tutus posed incredible on their
toes and whales smiling out from a wave spewing little red hearts out of their
blowholes. Not to mention the red cheeked fat lady holding the big heart shaped
box of candy or the strong man hitting the hammer causing the bell to ring at
the 300 pound mark.
With the
possibility of coming down with some third-world disease or licking the bottom
of my shoe being out of the picture, there was nothing I could do to put off
going to school the week of Valentines Day.
It started
with the avoidance of one of the parts of class I loved, art class. Each one
was issued a medium sized white paper bag upon which we were to express
ourselves while creating hearts and flowers from shades of red and pink
construction paper and white household paper
doilies.
That seemed tame enough. But it was all that
came after the art project was completed and hung on a clothesline down one
wall of the classroom where the pain and suffering began.
All the
bags were hung alphabetically so as to make it easy for each classmate on the
day of the party to walk the length of bags and deposit their Valentine
greeting into everyone’s appropriate bag.
The closer
I got to Friday, the ‘party’ day, the more I’d rather have been scheduled for a
root cannel. No such luck. Thankfully the teachers usually thought it more
controlled to ration out one homemade cupcake, chocolate chip cookie, a
sprinkle of candy hearts and a heart shaped lollypop on each plate avoiding
confusion and ensuring enough to go around.
So to sit
with my plate looking like all the rest was actually a welcomed part of this
whole dreaded episode. Being the third to the last alphabetically meant that if
I timed it just right I would only have to retrieve my bag of valentines, walk
slowly back to my seat before we had to collect our lunch boxes, book bags and
make it out the door to catch the busses home. I had become proficient in
performing the slowest timed walk.
With the
remainder of my plate of party fare in my lunchbox and my bag of valentines
crammed in my book bag, I was the first one out the door.
There was
one bright consolation in all this. Learning the slow walk had saved me the
embarrassment of having to show any of my valentines in class. That meant also
denying all the little hateful boys the opportunity to giggle and poke one
another when one after the other all the elephant, hippos, whales, fat ladies
and strong men valentines that had been deposited in my bag had to be viewed.
I couldn’t
help but wonder what the manufactures of these heart-piercing childhood darts
could possible have had in mind? Who did they think would go home with a bag
full of them? The little chubby girls got them in duplicate.
I couldn’t
toss them away before getting home; my mother would want to see them. She tried
her best to help me laugh at the brightly colored Valentines. The moment they
finally became for me the happy occasion they were intended to be was on the
hurried run out to the trash can in the back yard and deposited under the
clanging lid.
All except
one that I kept for several years. It was the year the mother of one of those
hateful little boys had made out his valentines because of him being sick, that
I was surprised with a sweet-faced blushing little drawn character holding a
valentine envelope asking me to be his Valentine, signed, Timmy.
Although
the memory of Timmy has long gone by the way side, evidently the memory of that
one Valentine still remains with me today. Even if it was only from his mother.
