Confessions of A Valentine's Fool
Embracing the day and all it's fumbling, punny imperfections.
Listen to this story: If you’re in the car, or cooking, or just lazy… you can listen to me read this story for you, in the audio file below.
Our kids get very excited about Valentine’s Day. They exchange cards and gifts with every one of their classmates. I went to all-boys schools, and the concept of giving another boy a Valentine - let alone a girl, from a different school - was so foreign, that I’m still trying to catch up.
I first learned of this “all-in” Valentine’s approach at American schools in the same way I learned a lot of things about American culture while growing up in Australia; watching The Simpsons. In one episode, the kids all trade cards, but Ralph Wiggum doesn’t get one. Lisa feels bad for him and drops a punny card in the empty box hanging from his desk. It has a train on it and reads; “I Choo Choo Choose You”. Ralph is smitten.
Valentine’s cards felt just that serious to me as a kid, too. Because of their rarity. Not to mention the distinct mistrust in expressions of love which seemed such a bedrock of Australian and Catholic culture. To receive a Valentine’s was no joke.
Or was it? One year my younger sister and I thought it would be funny to make my middle brother a fake Valentine’s Day card, from an anonymous admirer. Well, I think I thought it would be funny. I wrote it and I won’t implicate my sister in this cruelty just because she agreed to put on mum’s lipstick and kiss the note for authenticity. It worked, and I immediately felt terrible, and confessed. I still feel terrible.
Before my wife and I became parents, we had the time to worry about silly things like Valentine’s Day. For our first Valentine’s Day, a few months after we started dating, I pre-arranged to borrow a boat from a stranger on the canals in Venice, here in Los Angeles. Then I led her there with a lantern and very clumsily rowed her to a nearby restaurant for dinner. Young love! What happened to that guy?
From then on we’d take turns organizing something for one another each year. We didn’t want it to be something dudes have to do.
I remember blowing it badly at least once. I had a gig that night, and though it was my turn, in my nervousness and self-occupation had arranged nothing. We rushed to find something to eat before I had to be at soundcheck. Later, during my set opening for a popular female Canadian singer-songwriter - my wife in the audience, me giving all my attention to a crowd of strangers - it dawned on me that I had done something horribly wrong. It may be the one time I actually dedicated a song to her.
Once we became parents, I began to at least cook us a nice meal on Valentine’s night, after the kids were in bed. The last time I remember doing that, I had just placed our steaks on the skillet when my phone rang. It was an unknown number, but this was before SPAM calling went nuclear, so I answered. It was my eldest brother on someone else’s phone. He and his girlfriend had been in a bad accident on the freeway. I turned off the stove and spent most of the evening with them in an emergency room in the San Fernando Valley. Romantic.
Now the kids have dinner with us and through the fog of years and lost hours of sleep, I don’t even remember whose turn it is, or where the tradition stands. I’ve reverted back to my pre-American ignorance.
As I write this, Valentine’s Day is almost over once more. We all said “Happy Valentine’s” to each other this morning, as the family buzzed around the house. Then everyone went about their business.
The kids have been sick and I cook almost every night these days. So the idea of me making something “special” sounds downright exhausting and unnecessary, to be honest.
Before my six-year-old daughter went to school this morning, she gave me the one card I’ve received, left over from the stack she’d made for her classmates. It’s in the shape of a gnome. On the back she wrote a little note to “Dadi” and on the front it reads; “There’s gnome one like you.” I’m smitten.
I made a terrible hash of it on my first year with Leonie. Had done nothing for Valentines and got roundly abused by my children when they arrived home at 9.00pm. I made a late dash to the only place that sells flowers at 9.00pm - the supermarket and managed to snap up the saddest bunch of wilting roses. The card I added from my stash turned out to be a condolence card for a funeral. By the time I delivered Leonie was sound asleep, so in my most romantic way I hung the whole sad bunch from her front door handle. They weren't discovered for two days and in the blazing sun they hadn't just wilted they had melted. In the circumstances the card was most apt.