I’ve always been more of a Valentine-giver than a Valentine-getter. I’m not complaining; indeed, I suppose this is the lot of most women. It is, not to sound too offensively retrograde, our nature.
I was in sixth grade when I was presented with the only really romantic Valentine’s Day gift I’ve ever received: A delinquent from Amagansett whose name was not Lorenzo but whom I shall call Lorenzo (on the very unlikely off chance he’s still alive and reading this) came riding up our driveway on his dirt bike to give me a red-cellophane-wrapped, heart-shaped box of chocolates. I can remember seeing him, with no helmet on, through the living room window on a gray February day.
Lorenzo and I had met earlier in the week when I played hooky from the East Hampton Middle School to spend a day experiencing what life was like for my cousin Cleo in the faraway and exotic sixth grade over at Amagansett School. I caught Lorenzo’s eye, admittedly, because there were only around seven kids in the entire sixth-grade class at Amagansett School then, and he couldn’t miss me. New boys and new girls were rather few and far between in Amagansett in the late 1970s and I had acquired instant mystique without even trying, in my corduroy pants and my orangey-brown leather Bass shoes.
Lorenzo got off his dirt bike and walked quietly to the front door, which I opened to accept the chocolates silently, then he got back on his dirt bike and rode away. In retrospect, this was a pretty goddamn cool gesture from an 11-year-old, a real Arthur Fonzarelli moment, but I was immune to his greaser charms. He was shorter and slighter than I and I had a crush at that moment on not one but two boys in my own class, Scott and Rob (everyone did), and I didn’t return Lorenzo’s feelings. Plus, I had no idea this was to be my life’s pinnacle of cinematically romantic gestures.
My father, who was a better person than I, said the right thing to do would be to return the heart-shaped box of chocolates to Lorenzo, but I did not return them. I ate them all, leaving only the strawberry-filled one with the red paste inside, contemplating life and looking out the window to see if Lorenzo might return. I didn’t have the courage of Lorenzo, at least in the romance department. When it became clear a week or two later that I was choosing to simply ignore him, Lorenzo rode his dirt bike to Cranberry Hole Road and, in a highly dramatic act of revenge for a sixth-grader, spray-painted nasty words on the shingled siding of a neighbor’s house, thinking it was our summer place. Time has erased whatever the words were that he spray-painted, and I’ve never been able to track down on Google any news of what happened to Lorenzo as he grew into adulthood, but I imagine it wasn’t great.
I’m very much susceptible to holiday ephemera — all the holidays, Halloween, Christmas, Easter, Fourth of July — and still catch powerful seasonal feelings, a strong mood, from all the things we made, such as homemade Valentine’s Day cards from back in the day: ribbons in red velveteen or pink grosgrain, white doilies, Best-Test rubber cement, that particular bloody red of cheap construction paper. Do you remember stickers from a company called Dover, which published sticker books filled with cupids, Victorian hearts and arrows, sailors and kittens carrying red roses and yellow roses?
One of the nicest things about being a parent was an excuse to host Valentine-making afternoons around the kitchen table on a rainy Sunday when my kids were young enough to be forced to participate in such things. Lo, how many cupcakes in pink foil cups were topped with tiny paper cupids dancing tiptoe on a toothpick.
I persisted in forcing elaborate Valentine’s cards stuck through with heart-shaped lollipops — and trays of Conversation Hearts and chocolates bundled into hand-stamped and stickered craft-paper gift bags — on my children all through nursery school, kindergarten, elementary, and well into middle school. I hope I live long enough to force Valentine-making on my grandchildren. Chances are, affinities skipping a generation as they do, they may turn out to like vintage cards that say stuff like “I’d like to CALL you my Valentine!” (a teddy bear holding a phone receiver to his ear) and “I’m nuts about you!” (a squirrel wearing a tuxedo and holding a bouquet) or “You’re a dilly!” (a pickle dancing with a tomato) as much as their grandma does.
Are Conversation Hearts made from the same material as Necco Wafers?
When did we last see a Necco Wafer?
It is the story of my life that, post sixth grade, I have pretty much always been on the giver end of the Valentine exchange. Don’t get me wrong, there may be more happiness in the giving than the getting; that is one of the trite truths teachers and preachers like to repeat, but there is quite a lot of validity to it. Still, nothing turns out as we expect, and I have continued to keep an eye on my living room window, half-anticipating the arrival of another dirt bike. I remember, one time in college when I lived on Avenue B, crafting a kitschy Valentine’s collage from cutout magazine photographs and pasting the collage onto a heart-shaped box of Whitman Sampler candy for a boy named Malcolm who accepted the gift silently and who died, not so romantically, a few months later in a fall from a suspension tower on the Manhattan Bridge, falling not into the East River but onto the pavement of the Flatbush Avenue Extension.
But to return to the puppies, pickles, kittens, and doilies, I will use this February occasion to offer the unsolicited opinion, old-curmudgeon-style, that it has become all too easy to find cute vintage-style paper goods these days. Good taste has been mass produced and the mass proliferation robs them of their aura, their magic. Retro-reproduction “Let’s pardner up!” (pony with a lasso) cards are a dime a dozen on Etsy, and there were some cute vintage-y Valentines in TJ Maxx over the weekend, which really isn’t the spirit of the thing. I left them on the rack.
But I was delighted when my daughter, 17 years old and in her final year of boarding school, dropped the hint that she would appreciate a Valentine’s Day care package, as in days of old, from her mama. Off I flew, like cupid’s arrow, to the Sag Harbor Variety Store to buy shell-pink-velvet ribbon and rosebud tissue paper to wrap something heart-shaped in.