Happy VD!

This morning my coworker was talking about the Valentine’s events at her daughter’s elementary school. The kids pay $0.50 for every student/teacher they want to send a singing valentine to, and then the school chorus comes around today and sings to the Valentines – with an announcement beforehand such as, “This is for Mason from Amanda.” Her 3rd grader is sending 23 songs, because she wants to make sure all the kids that didn’t get one last year are covered this year – isn’t she sweet?

Anyway, this got me thinking about the Valentines practices from my own old school days. Let’s review, shall we?

In elementary school, we decorated shoe boxes and brought in our little paper valentine’s cards. I’m pretty sure I selected the largest shoebox I could find, because my well developed brain reasoned that this would mean more Valentines. It’s a little strange to me that there are kids now that don’t know this tradition – the wrapping of the shoebox in pretty paper, then pasting on hearts of various sizes and colors, and of courses cutting the little mail slot in the top. I always brought a card for everyone in the class, although I was careful in which cards were selected for the boys. Especially certain boys – the ones you wanted to make sure didn’t think that you, you know, like liked them. A card that said “Happy Valentine’s Day!” was ok, but one that said, “Will you be my Valentine?” was not. Such embarrassing messages had to be avoided. After exchanging cards and pouring out our boxes, we feasted on cupcakes, punch, and candy. Mmm.

Then there was junior high. I remember absolutely nothing about Valentine’s Day during these years. If there was any kind of tradition at school, then I must have buried it so deep into my mind that it cannot be recalled. Either that, or I never acknowledged it at all in the first place.

And then there was high school. In high school, we had the option to “buy” a carnation. We’d write a message on a tiny piece of paper that would be stapled around the carnation, and these would be delivered on V-Day during homeroom. If more than one carnation was purchased for you, you still got just one, but all the pieces of paper were stapled around it together. Therefore there were always going to be some girls showing off their voluminous amounts of paper, fanning them around and giggling loudly. If you got just one, you were relieved that you barely made the flower cut. If you got no carnation at all, you were marked as unloved. But if you were my friend Lob, who is a bold sort of gal, then you made sure this didn’t happen. One year Lob picked a guy to badger for days about buying her a flower. Not because she had any romantic intentions towards him, but I think just because he was nice and she knew she could boss him around. And what made her a great friend here was that she didn’t just demand one for herself, no, she would then point to me, standing awkwardly somewhere nearby, and say, “And you better get one for Jennifer, too!” (Which makes me wonder… why doesn’t she do this any more? Does she have better things to do with her time than lobby for flowers for me from strange men? What kind of friend has she turned out to be, anyway??)
…but back to my story… I still remember seeing her poor victim that year on V-Day. He had listened well, but when he tried to buy us carnations, had found that they were all sold out! So, on the way to school that morning, he had his mom drive him to a flower store, and he bought us real carnations. Ok, the other ones were real, too, but the ones from the shop were much larger and more healthy looking! So, there he was, panicked and sweating because he was late to school due to his flower-buying, and frantically searching for us in the hallway, so that he could deliver our flowers and not get in trouble. Way to go, Lob! Bullying is always the right answer. That’s what I says.

Well, at some point during high school I guess they got cheap on us, and switched from carnations to the old grade-school style paper Valentines. Again, we’d pay around $0.25 ahead of time, pick our cards, write in them, and seal them up with our intended’s name and homeroom number. Which brings me to my second story…
I got a bunch of cards one year! I mean, a whole lot – more than anyone else in my homeroom. Because 98% of them were multiples from two different friends (Lob, ever faithful, was one of them). They were full of inside jokes and other witty things, and some were signed with fake names, although it was obvious who they were from. Here’s the problem – my home room teacher wouldn’t give me all of my Valentines because he couldn’t believe that I could get so many!! He had handed out the three that had both my first and last name on them, but all the rest, which had only my first name, he kept for himself. Now, not only was I the only Jennifer in the homeroom, but I was also the only Jennifer in the grade. But what does he do? He has the nerve to look extremely perplexed, take them all back to his desk, spread them out and stare at them some more. Finally saying, mostly to himself, “I don’t understand… I mean, they say Jennifer…. But there are just so many…. …. I mean, I guess they could be for Jennifer (my last name)….”
About this time the bell rang and I went up to his desk while he continued to mull over this strange problem, until finally he allowed me to take the Valentines, still looking unsatisfied, and I walked off with them, a bit less light-hearted than I had been at the beginning of homeroom. Thank you, Senor M., for sharing your disbelief with both me and the rest of my class. That was a lovely Valentines treat.
Perhaps I should have explained that they were all joke cards, and his world would have made sense again.

All right, now Blay, where is that worst date story you promised? I would tell mine, but I have very important work to do here… as you can tell from the sparesness of this post.