My Funny Valentines Were Nothing to Laugh At

I’d feel better about Valentine’s Day if I didn’t think it was a holiday invented by construction-paper salesmen.

I went to a two-room rural Massachusetts school in the waning days of the Truman Administration. What we did before every holiday, for weeks ahead, was cut construction paper.

Halloween was orange pumpkins and black witches. They gave way to brown turkeys with tails that belonged on the NBC peacock. Christmas was green trees and wreaths, red ribbons and white candles with orange flames.

Valentine’s Day was the worst.

In October we could get relief from witches and pumpkins by playing (highly illegal) tackle football at recess. In December we had carols to sing, lists to prepare and the Lionel catalogue to dream over.

By the end of January we were reduced to hitting each other. At which time the teacher would say: “Take out your paste and scissors. It is time to make valentines.”

The scissors were snub-nosed things about three inches long that hurt fingers more than they cut paper. The paste was white glop that formed rock-hard lumps.

Worse, the whole process was designed for people who handled scissors well, made proper circles in penmanship and always knew procedures.

That was never me. At first I tried to make a valentine by cutting the whole thing. I ended with nothing that resembled a heart.

After a while I learned to fold the paper first and cut out half a heart. Better, but still not close. I took up the scissors again, wincing.

The girls--members of what I later called the thought police--of course made perfect little hearts. After whipping out seven absolutely identical ones, they would come over to the struggling boys one-by-one and, with a smirk, ask to see what was taking us so long.

After feeble attempts at one heart, we graduated to the multilayer valentine--five or more hearts in a stack.

The girls tittered and cut dozens of hearts, each microscopically larger, all the exact shape. The colors matched and complemented and flowed into one another. Ending with a heart so small that it took a magnifying glass to find, they ran to the teacher asking, “Is this good?”

Each of my hearts was a different shape. The paste oozed out the edges. And I could never remember which colors clashed. My stack looked like a contour map of West Virginia.

Once we had the hearts stacked, we had to put them on doilies.

If layering was hard, coloring doilies was worse. The average doily had eight or 12 recurring patterns. We were supposed to color each portion of each pattern the same way.

It was precise, detailed work. Some people took days to color their doilies. Others of us took less time. Some people had museum-quality valentines. Some of us didn’t.

I don’t know what the girls did with their valentines. I threw mine away after I got off the school bus. By eighth grade I had my own landfill 30 yards from the bus stop.

We boys hit our stride when someone showed us a heart with an arrow through it. We liked that. We drew hearts with two arrows in them, then five or eight. Hearts with knives and spears and spikes in them. Hearts awaiting a tomahawk or hammer. Hearts getting shot. Hearts getting bazooka-ed.

The thought police confiscated our best efforts and called them Exhibit A in their next report. We were summarily chastised. We were told that we weren’t serious enough.

I said that anyone who thought coloring doilies important was too serious to start with. That won me no points.

Eventually I got my revenge. For years there were certain girls I’d never ask to dance.