hearts and flowers and really weird things

Valentine’s Day has never been a very big holiday for me. In the past few years, I’ve treated it like a holiday that other people celebrate. Like Hanukkah or Boxing Day or Easter. I don’t mind coworkers passing around candy and things because, hey, free chocolate. My only gripe has been that it is impossible to dine out that night, but then it’s difficult to eat out on Thanksgiving and Easter too.
I know lots of people like to view Valentine’s Day as a day to shower their relatives, platonic friends, and even coworkers with little presents and cards and things, but I haven’t viewed the day in that way since I was a little girl. Valentine’s Day is for couples to get schmoopy with each other and hopefully the rest of us can let them do that and go along with our business without too much disruption.

My parents gave us little heart-shaped boxes of candy when we were kids. We turned out to be very picky kids about chocolate (my parents really have only themselves to blame here) and over the years that turned into little Whitman samplers and so forth. Some years my sister and I got very silly lacy panties as a joke gift—generally too full of cheap itchy lace to actually wear, but funny to look at. I can tell you the time in my life when I was the most short on money, because I was actually wearing some of the less uncomfortable joke Valentine’s panties since I couldn’t afford to buy new ones.
In high school, Valentine’s Day became a day to flaunt your status with your boyfriend. My school tried very hard to impose a rule banning flower and other deliveries but somehow people always found a way. We all envied the girl who had to struggle from classroom to classroom with her books and a vase of flowers and a big white bear with a pink bow… although we all secretly wanted to see her trip and fall on the vase, accidentally decapitating the bear and making a big mess.
My first Valentine-gift-from-a-boy was in my junior year of high school. The guy gave me a teddy bear with a toe tag on it. The tag read “Emotionally exhausted and morally bankrupt.” It’s a quote. (Okay, it’s from an episode of MASH in which Hawkeye put a similar toe tag on Frank after he passed out.) I still have the teddy bear somewhere, although the toe tag fell off long ago. A nice present, traditional with a twist.
My senior year, the Evil Ex gave me my favorite Valentine’s present ever, although I didn’t realize it at the time: a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces, which I hadn’t yet read. That copy is falling apart in my bookcase and I read it about once a year. I like the cover art and the size and so I don’t really want to replace it. (Someday, they’ll print that book with a movie cover. I shudder to think.)
I received my favorite Valentine’s card in college. My boyfriend at the time made it for me out of black construction paper. It is shaped like a severed ear. That’s right, I had a black severed ear Valentine. It’s really romantic if you think about it. I am sure I still have it in a file somewhere.
The severed-ear card came from Columbine (if you hadn’t guessed already), whom I dated on and off in college and grad school. We finally broke up for the last time exactly 10 years ago tomorrow … yeah, on Valentine’s Day. I was sad because it was Valentine’s and he hadn’t even called, so I called him, and we realized all of a sudden that it was over.
After that, the only way in which I ever celebrated Valentine’s Day was maybe to watch Some Like It Hot on that day, because it is a very appropriate movie if you think about it.
The building where I work has some faint echoes of the high-school mentality of Valentine’s Day, especially when the holiday falls on a weekday. The front desk is crowded with floral bouquets and arrangments. In an open workspace like mine, you can see who has the roses or balloons on her desk. However, this is more likely to bring a good-natured smile to people’s faces than a rush of spitting envy, or at least I hope so.
A few years ago, my friend Lucy thought it would be fun to bring all her workplace friends lots of flowers and balloons and so forth. She brought me a very pretty bunch of red tulips, and while I’m not a big flower lover I did think they were very pretty. People kept walking by my desk with a slightly puzzled look, like they were wondering who sent the flowers, but they didn’t ask and I didn’t say anything.
My parents still like to send Valentine cards, but my mom sends cards for Thanksgiving, Halloween, and Easter, so she’s just in thrall to Hallmark anyway. Some years they still send a silly pair of joke panties. (My mom admitted recently that she intentionally buys joke panties—like the ones I got for Christmas—too small so we won’t get offended by possibly assuming she thinks we have big butts. Okay, whatever.) They don’t send candy because my mom thinks that only encourages us to eat fattening foods.
But it has been a long time since I mustered up any real liking or disliking for the holiday. My sister is currently in one of those Valentine’s-Is-Evil phases that I guess we all go through, and it’s hard for me to remember ever being that bitter and nasty about it. (I may not have ever been.) Not even when it was the anniversary of the breakup of my last serious relationship, although it was sometimes rather sad to count back the years and think about how long it had been.
I’m part of a couple now but the fact is that we are still schmoopy with each other all the time. Well, it’s barely been six months. And if you’re schmoopy almost every day, it’s hard to get very interested in a holiday for the occasion. So we’re not planning anything special. Maybe we’ll go buy some nice beer and watch American Splendor, which we’re looking forward to seeing. (We just saw Some Like It Hot a month or so ago.) Maybe we’ll take a break from various freelance projects to share some chocolate ice cream.
I never did think that once I became part of the group that actually can observe Valentine’s Day, that I would pretty much ignore it the way I’ve always done. I guess old habits are hard to break. But please … honey … if you’re reading? No joke panties. Thank you.