HUNTING SEASON FOR CUPID
For most of my early elementary school years, every Valentine’s Day our teacher would have us write little cards to everybody in the class. I guess they believed in Universal Love, although looking back, I know they were good God-fearing Georgians and probably didn’t intend to promote what would now be banned behavior in most of our cautious classrooms outside Sodom and Gomorrah. WILL YOU BE MY VALENTINE? we asked everybody oh so sweetly. So innocently. Who knew the Supreme Court would probably be the ones to answer that ultimately. So I guess the jury is still out…..
Whatever the ruling from the folks in the black robes, we’ll still have Valentine’s Day, celebrated not so much for Cupid and his/her aphrodisiac-tipped arrows as a marketing tool for florists and chocolatiers bent on cashing in on the lovefest. And why not? After all, candy’s sweet, flowers are fragrant. They celebrate Love, and lately, that seems more and more an endangered species. I see the boyz down my end of the island rushing in to the wilted flower section of the Tyee Store MegaMart after work on the anointed day, hoping to grab a last minute bouquet of anything colorful and perfumed, about to go home to the love of their life with a handful of posies instead of the usual quart of Steel Reserve 9%. And maybe they buy a card, something saccharine and hokey and cloying as only Hallmark can manage, then they get back in their 4×4 extended cab Dodge Ram one ton with the workboxes and ladders and upside down wheelbarrows filling the acreage of the truckbed, and for a moment, right before they tear another hole in the cratered blacktop of the parking lot, we’re back in Mrs. Fleming’s 2nd grade class in backwash Georgia with all the rest of our love struck classmates, scribbling Valentines and putting candy hearts with inscriptions in the envelopes. For everyone.
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Valentines for everyone!!!