No grown woman should be able to say this, but here goes: my most memorable Valentine's Day was in fifth grade.
All the classrooms on the fifth grade floor of Snider Avenue School were lined with decorated paper "mailboxes" with names on them, so we could slip valentines to our friends in other homerooms as we made our way from course to course throughout the day - this in anticipation of Valentine's Day afternoon when each homeroom would have its own party with treats and games and time to open all our cards.
The game my homeroom teacher came up with was this: We were each assigned to construct one special homemade valentine to be evaluated based on creativity and execution. Our creations would be put on display, with a winner selected by class vote.
I spent days trolling the five and dime and stationery stores for materials to inspire my creativity - but construction paper and doilies, ribbons and lace and rickrack... they all seemed so predictable. Creative... creative... our teacher said. I toyed with a pile of cherry lifesavers trying to figure out something I could make with them but ended up eating them before an idea formulated... I considered making a really big cookie... and then I spotted it: a remnant of gleaming red satin fabric in my mother's sewing room - and bam! I would make a perfect red heart pillow, about 10" in diameter. Sounds simple, but challenging to 10-year-old fingers angling for "execution" points as well.
I attempted a conceptual artist argument to my mother. "I'll make the heart pattern out of this paper bag. I'll cut the pieces and pin them together. You sew it on the machine. Then I'll stuff it and hand-stitch the closure."
"Nothing doing, kid. It's your project, not mine. You're on your own. They don't want parents involved."
Like they cared! Like other parents weren't cutting and pasting doilies and ribbons at that very moment. But this was her standard operating position and there was no budging her.
Thus began a long, frustrating trial-and-error fight to the finish between me and the Singer sewing machine that bloodied several of my fingers and kept me up past bedtime. But the following morning, it all seemed worth it. I loved my little pillow. So elegant. I knew it was going to be a great day. I remember the moment of placing it on the table at the front of homeroom. It just glowed there. It was a stand-out. I was so proud.
... which was the last positive thought my lovely little creation attracted all day, because nobody - not one other soul in that entire building - could figure out what that weird thing was doing in the mix.
"But you were supposed to make a card," said one of my girlfriends.
"No. She said make a valentine."
"But a valentine is a card!"
"A valentine can be a gift, and she said it should be creative."
My friend scrunched her face and sighed.
And so it went - at recess, after lunch, and later as we started our party. So many questions, criticisms, such bewilderment - "But what's it supposed to be?!" Scrunch. Scrunch. Scrunch.
By the time the teacher got around to adding her two cents, I was too worn down, demoralized, and bitterly confused to make much of a case. She came to the pillow, stopped, looked around, then down at the floor - "Did something get separated from this one? A message or something?"
"No. It's just meant to be like that."
"No message?"
I was silent, but in my head there was shouting: "It's soft and puffy. The fabric is like something a Hollywood movie star would wear! You just want to stroke it or rest your cheek against it. It's not some card you put away in a drawer. You can have on your bed all year long. What's wrong with these people?!"
I couldn't have named it then, but if a ten-year-old can feel utterly bereft of tribe, then that's exactly what I felt that Valentine's Day.
Ironically, my paper mailbox was stuffed to the breaking point with cards and many of them were actual folding cards - the kind you buy one at a time. And five were those big fancy cards, the kind grown-ups give, the ones that cost several dollars at the card shop. These weren't just valentines; these were operatic big-crush pronouncements. Three were from awkward boys that I was nice to, and I was genuinely moved that simple good manners meant so much to them. One was from Joe Fuss, whom I barely knew and thought of as a tough from one of the other classes. He had even stuffed a ring from a gumball machine in his. That one stunned me. The most extravagant of all was from Doug Omwake, the really, really cute boy who sat immediately to my left in homeroom, and I had a crush on him, too. This spectacular card which folded out in layers like a little theatre of cut lace should have thrilled me, and there was a smidgen of that, tempered mightily by this: Doug Omwake had been acting especially embarrassed for (by?) me and my "dumb pillow." Embarrassed! What nerve. I was in no mood to tolerate some dumb boy who couldn't recognize beauty when it was right there on a table in front of him.
So there I was, this little girl, with so many special admirers, awash in expensive valentines, and all I felt was lonely. The alone-est person on all of Snider Avenue that afternoon.
That night, to the muffled sounds of my family downstairs watching TV, I sat alone in my darkened room, clutching a soft red heart to my chest and thinking life would make a whole lot more sense if gypsies showed up at the back door to retrieve me.
In retrospect, I guess one might have predicted that I'd end up in a place where Cupid's bow and arrow penetrates Mother Earth, living in a home surrounded by these...
