I’m not really a fan of Valentine’s Day – never have been. Possibly it’s a case of sour grapes because I’ve never really been anybody’s valentine, except maybe once. It’s a holiday that has evolved to focus on “stuff” and equates love with roses or diamonds or candy. I can’t count the number of times in my practice that I sat with clients who were angry over what they considered to be their partner’s inadequate attempts at buying their love on Valentine’s Day, and tried to be non-judgmental and accepting of their feelings. The expectations tied up with this day, frankly, I find obscene. The other reason I eschew Valentine’s Day is all the darned sugar. Chocolate and more chocolate. Little hard sugar hearts with Be Mine and other endearments stamped on them. Red and pink M&M’s. Red and pink marshmallow hearts from the people who bring us Peeps at Easter. Beautifully decorated valentine themed cupcakes at three bakeries I pass twice daily in Grand Central Terminal. This holiday represents another sugar gauntlet.
My first memory of Valentine’s Day is from the first grade when my mom baked her highly addictive sour cream sugar cookies for my class. She frosted them in pink and neatly wrote each child’s name in white frosting on their own cookie. They were beautiful and I was very proud to deliver each one to the proper child when we had our party in the classroom. Back in those days, we exchanged valentines with each other, but the rule was that everybody had to receive a valentine. The teacher would send home a list of every child’s name in the class and whether or not you were friends with everyone, there was no exclusion allowed. I remember very carefully picking out valentines for my classmates from the box my mother bought for me, being sure to save the pretty ballerina card for Christine, who I thought was the prettiest girl in my class. And I secretly hoped that of all the valentines I would receive that day, one of them would be a ballerina. There was always one in every box of store bought valentines.
Every year it was the same. I crossed my fingers and prayed that I would be the recipient of the ballerina card – or the princess card – or whatever card featured some character who was ultra-feminine and pretty. Somehow in my mind if that card was bestowed on me, it meant that the giver thought that I was ultra-feminine and pretty. I didn’t feel that way inside but looked for any external “evidence” I could get.
My second solid memory of Valentine’s Day was in 8th grade when I sat at a card table set up in our dining room, listening to the Four Seasons sing Working My Way Back to You on the radio while I made valentines from red and pink construction paper, paper doilies, glitter, and stickers for my four best girl friends. There were no boys in the equation – well, except for Judy and her boy-next-door, but that didn’t quite count. He went to a different school so during our 8 - 3 school day, we could pretend he didn’t exist and Judy just belonged to us.
In the 9th grade, we had Mr. Greiner for social studies – global studies I think it was called. Mr. Greiner was a very tall and solid man and he was an avid sports fan. The first week of school, he gave us a current events pop quiz, as he was apt to do, and one of the questions was to name a professional basketball team. My answer? The Harlem Globetrotters. I mean, really, what did I know about basketball (or any sport, for that matter)!!! I’m sure he either laughed himself silly or just pegged me for a loser.
Mr. Greiner’s other chief characteristic was that he was mean. Physically mean. He had a reputation for banging boys up and down the hallway against lockers. Bad boys, boys who mouthed off, or made him mad in some way. It would happen and word about who was the latest victim passed through the halls like wild fire. Back then, teachers got away with that kind of behavior. Even though I wasn’t a boy, and didn’t mouth off, I still feared Mr. Greiner. The sound of his booming voice made my heart do triple-flips and my knees need to sit.
What does this have to do with Valentine’s Day? Well, somehow, I think from our gym teacher who we believed was having a romance with him, my girlfriends and I found out that Mr. Greiner’s birthday was Valentine’s Day. By February, we had learned that one way to get on his good side was to produce obsessively neat and detailed maps of the countries we were studying. He would give the class a list of all the elements of a country that were to be included – rivers, lakes, mountains, anything of geological/geographical import – and order us to produce maps to scale. There seemed to be a direct correlation between the amount of time spent working on the maps in our local library and the magnitude of his grudging approval of our efforts as he handed them back in class. We decided, my girlfriends and I, that we could further cement his approval (and perhaps a guarantee to never be the victims of the locker-bounce) by acknowledging his birthday. So on February 13 after school, we gathered in my mom’s kitchen and baked a heart-shaped birthday cake, which we frosted and decorated for Mr. Greiner, and took to school the next morning.
It was a successful undertaking. We studied his reaction carefully as we surprised him with the cake. We’d rarely seen Mr. Greiner smile, unless it was sadistically, and certainly had never heard him speak in anything but a booming and intimidating voice. But that day, he glowed a bit red from embarrassment, smiled broadly, and actually bowed to us as he said simply, “Thank you.”
The tiger was tamed. An aggressor on your side is better than an aggressor on the opposite side.
