B-My-Valentine?

All thru gradeschool, I dreaded
this day

This day of carefully cut and pasted

Valentine pouches

which decorated and then hung

 on the front of our pint sized desk

or the back of our

tiny chair.....

 

Every year it was an agony for me
in those days of timid quiet

and no friends

as even then I was awkward

with others, preferring my

own company

 

"A loner" as I was 'oft described

in the comments section
of my report cards by my teachers

 

Happily content as that loner
with my imagination, my dreams, my plans

all the school year thru

except for this day of the year

 

Even now, decades later

I can still palpate the discomfort

of seeing every val-n-tine pouch

in each row fill with pink and yellow and white

envelopes

 

Every pouch except mine

 

Mine always had just two

One from my mother (sent in my lunch box)
to put in my val-n-pouch
and one from my teachers

(who made sure they had extras)

 

I never knew
(nor even thought to wonder)

if I was the only one

with only two grown up val-n-tines

in my thin and silly sad decorated grade school pouch

 

I'm not sure it would have mattered
if I had known I wasn't the only one

 

I'm still dancing on the fringe, doing things my own way

and every year I think (now) I'm glad my val-n-tine pouch
was mostly empty

because it taught me you can survive heartache

it showed me that the love/kindness of just a few
matters

(thank you mom)
(thank you teachers with emergency val-n-tines)

 

I've no thesis to prove, no facts of correlation

but I suspect we become strong or weak

early on in our life

I suspect we devise and develop ways
to stand tall in the face of disappointment

or lack of rousing peer approval

when we are more small than tall

 

Perhaps that's why each February 14th
I think back on those little construction paper pouches

knowing it foreshadowed
the worst

and the best

of life

of me

 

I hope your val-n-tine

day

(pouch full or thin)

was happy  :-)