Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day circa 1971. A week or so before Valentine's Day, the teacher told our class to bring a shoebox from home to be decorated for Valentine's Day. The object was to decorate your shoebox with red, pink and white construction paper. We would very carefully cut out hearts and glue them to the box. Sometimes it was just easier to draw the hearts on the box than cut them out of the paper. Forget "safety scissors", we had the really, really sharp ones that could draw blood if you weren't careful. And there's always the kid who ate more paste than applied it to the paper and shoebox. I think he did that just to gross out the rest of us. The teacher would cut a slot in the lid of the shoebox. This was so your fellow classmates could put Valentines in your "mailbox" on the day of the party.

The teacher sent a list home with us that listed each classmate's name. Mama took me to the store to purchase my Valentine cards. I don't remember too much about the actual Valentine cards other than they were very small and it was difficult for a first grader to write on the back of the cards. And it was taboo to give a card with the word LOVE on it to a guy that would take it the wrong way. So after carefully selecting which card to give which classmate, I set to work on personalizing each one of them. A fellow classmate told me years later that he kept the Valentine I gave to him simply because I wrote on the back: "TO FROBIN". I guess I got so involved in writing "TO" and "FROM" that I kept on going with my name after the "RO".

On the day of the party, each student took his or her turn and delivered Valentines to the appropriate mailboxs. And the magic moment came when we ate heart-shaped sugar cookies and drank Hawaiian Punch and opened our mailboxes. It came as no surprise when I received a card that stated "LOVE IS IN THE AIR, VALENTINE" and it was from the paste-eating kid.