Stupid Cupid

I won first prize for a giant pink hippo card I made for a Valentine contest in the second grade.

I used to love Valentine’s Day. Every year we’d decorate shoe boxes with pink and red construction paper, doilies, and glitter. It was exciting to open them at the end of the day to see how many valentines were inside.  One year I was thrilled to see a card from Richard Allison, a shy, pale, runny-nosed boy who I adored.

By the sixth grade we were too snarky to participate in such juvenile practices as card contests and heart-encrusted boxes.  I started a boy-haters club that year. I was president. We’d meet at Debby Barnhardt’s house and talk about how disgusting boys were. Richard Allison became a not-so-distant memory.

Somewhere along the line I decided to like boys again. 

As a freshman I dated an “older man.” He was a senior who taught me how to kiss at four way stops out on country roads.  For Valentine’s Day,  he hand-stitched a shirt of white muslin for me. He’d been inspired by a Simon and Garfunkel song.  The year after that, he gave me a life-sized Raggedy Ann doll. He was so romantic. I could have married him but I was only seventeen.  At least I was smart enough to know I still needed to experience things.  I wish I still had that shirt.

As I grew older, Valentine’s Day was hit or miss. Some years brought roses, others brought thorns. But even in broken-hearted-bitter years I could still count on the cards from my parents and grandma. The flowery, sentimental cards always made me smile. Eventually even those cards stopped because, of course, people don’t live forever.

Now I dread the V day. I see it as just another marketing ploy.  It’s the biggest day of the year for florists. Think of all those poor, dead flowers! I have to endure the numerous calls for OTHER people to go to the front desk for flower deliveries when Valentines falls on a work day. Shit,  it’s on a Tuesday this year.  yaaaaay.  Last year I called the operator [at work] and told her that if there were too many deliveries for me, she could donate my flowers to  hospitals.  I was kidding.

The sound of jewelry commercials are like fingernails on a chalk board to me.  I can’t hit MUTE fast enough.  Beautiful young couples gaze at each other.  He opens a box.  She gasps.   Sometimes there’s a necklace in the box…sometimes a ring.  It’s the same couple, just a different product. 

Can we please satisfy the snarky sixth-grader in me who would just ONCE like to see the same woman from the sappy commercial entering a pawn shop a month later?  She opens the box, the sweaty guy behind the counter wearing a ton of gold chains around his beefy neck gasps with delight?

I realize that love is a wonderful thing.  Really.  I do.  I get it.  Geez.                                                                         

I’m ready to concede that I’ve failed in love.  I’m not cut-out for listening to the same joke a thousand times, or the feel of cold water in the middle of the night when you expect a plastic seat. Or watching him carefully fish a booger out of his nose and place it on the end table.  Or the farts that register on a Richter, not confined to the privacy of our home, which would be bad enough. There was the sketchy driving that I certainly don’t miss…either edging ever-so-slightly over the center line or toward the ditch at the side of the road before he realizes what the fuck he’s doing.  And let’s not forget how he expected me to be “inventory control” every time we went somewhere…you got my keys? you got my wallet? you got my comb?  Or putting up with accusations that I somehow endeavored to hide  things from him???  HEY?  Where’d you hide the Bean and Bacon soup??  He apparently had some kind of disability that would not allow him to raise his arms, grasp objects, and move them about.  If the object of his desire was not right in front, I had obviously HID it from him.  He had no problem spotting hot dog vendors in t-backs at the side of the road a mile away, however.  No, I don’t miss arguing about the house being too hot, or coming home from work to clean a house that had been clean when I left that morning, or the unequal distribution of work, the lack of privacy, the questionable stains on clothes [skid marks], the eye-rolling, the ….well, you get the picture.   I’m just not good at it.                                                                                   

My parents were together for 63 years. I remember MAYBE one fight. But I probably imagined it. They understood how to keep their eyes on the prize and overlook all the mundane irritations that occur on a daily basis.  The need to be right and the preservation of pride were never part of the equation.  They tolerated each other’s behavior, even when it was occasionally embarrassing. They remained each other’s biggest fans. I think that every day was Valentine’s Day for them.

Geez.  This story has become as sappy as those commercials.  See how crazy this holiday makes me?  Stupid cupid.

Oh, alright.  I‘ll try to be happy for the couples of the world, even though they irritate the hell out of me.   Maybe I’ll even make a couple of valentines, just for old-time’s sake. There’s no rule that you HAVE to be a couple to deserve a Valentine, right?  I’ll send them to my daughter, my girlfriends, and my sister, because the kind of love I have for them is not the kind toilet seats, nasty farts, bad jokes, or hours of football can destroy.