Happy St. Valentine's Day to Everyone!

I hope this day of gush and mush finds everyone well. Whether or not you are IN love today, I hope you are loved and feel loved, romantically or not.

3 St. Valentine's Day Stories

1.
(1996)
Among the perks of going to Maranatha Baptist Bible College was the opportunity to attend events the administration hosted and included on the lengthy "mandatory attendance" list. While acknowledgement of a saint of Rome named "Valentine" would have been to admit an unambiguous, documented church history pre-1500 and was therefore never mentioned, the Tops saw fit to organize an event in our gymnasium/chapel/fine-arts-hall for St. Valentine's Day and force everyone to attend. The guest performers for 1996 turned out to be a couple who'd sung at our church back home now and then -- everything they performed was operatic, or in their best operatic style. Jack and I couldn't really stand the singers and found reasons to skip church whenever they performed at our church but couldn't come up with an excuse the Dean's Office would buy. Whichever girl happened to hold my infatuous attention at the time declined my invitation to the concert. The other upon whom my heart was fixed had just recently started dating a soccer team captain or something. Valentine's Day, then, only needed ignored, the Friday night spent on homework or ping-pong in the dorm basement. Jack and his girlfriend, of course, urged me to just ask someone so we could double-date. I, however, knew I'd be a terrible, irritable date to any girl who might agree to go "as friends," and the holiday combined with the faux opera danger to send me careening deep into a faraway place where I alternated between hostility and depression before finally acquiescing to both. No way could I, would I be able to bear what was about to happen. Dressed in my required pre-concert dinner apparel, I ate the cheap slabs of beef and gravy with a choked throat, trying to ignore the happy couples around me. While Jack and C----- flirted and laughed in the cafeteria before heading to the gymnatorium, I sulked back to our dorm room to get at least a little more time alone. I sat for a few minutes, then, knowing that I may get in a little trouble for sleeping during the performance (the university had people watching during these sort of things and chapel services) but didn't need the "demerits" an unexcused absence to a major event would bring, I unceremoniously but not without a martyr's melodrama, downed most of a bottle of a generic Nyquil equivalent. I spent most of the performance slumped over, trying to sleep. The merciful sleep for which I hoped did not occur, but rather sluggish distortion. Pretentious vibrato-woven wailing voices darted and poked about my woozy head. My shoes, pinchingly uncomfortable, glared back up at me but my back just didn't want to stay straight up.A swirl of the metal folding chair in front, a worried Jack and C----- beside, the faded tan vinyl tarp covering the gym floor below, all familiar but confusingly foreign, wound around my half-closed eyes. Closed eyes brought unexplainable, disappointed images shaking what looked like heads and whispering an inability to love or be good or even disappear and stop bothering everyone. Somehow the show finally ended, days later, and I shuffled a groggy path to my dorm room, changed clothes, and wandered back to our main building, up the grey stone stairs to the custodial headquarters, unwilling to miss work. I'd made it there an hour or so early, luckily, and dropped to the floor for some quiet rest. A few minutes before the shift began, I slowly awoke and realized a few other student workers who cleaned at night were standing around. The kid from Bangladesh kept poking me with his foot.

2.
(2005)
We both technically have V-Day evening free this year since S. has a short quiz and that only in tonight's class, but my homework load was lighter (or at least easier to shift off to other weeks, we'll put it that way) this past weekend so we used the whole thing to celebrate St. Valentine's Day. Neither of us celebrated it much in the past but sometimes when you're married, specific days like this are good to set aside as a time to spend more time together when that can't be the case as often as you'd like. No, we don't use the day as a time to act in ways we wouldn't the rest of the year (as was a major reason I hated V-Day in the past, not to mention Christmass, Easter, Veterans, etc. Days). One of the marks of our relationship is that we both really enjoy doing little things for each other so this was more of a time-spending opportunity. We're too broke to really go somewhere besides home for this sort of thing, but still managed a good time. We wandered around downtown for a while Friday night and had a decent meal out there early on. We spent a decent amount of time at the Antiquarium, a used bookstore that also sells records and CDs in the basement. I bought some book on lit.crit. that looked worthwhile and she bought a children's book she really likes, the one they're basing some new movie on, All Because of Winn Dixie. Saturday we went to the University and exercised before going to see Hotel Rwanda, a film about the civil war between the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, and more specifically about a Hutu man who managed a 4 star hotel and let refugees stay there amidst all the violence. The film left us with some questions (for one, why the hell no one ever talked about that in the U.S., and why the U.S. and U.N., for the most part, failed to intervene). I knew somewhat about the situation and heard about it a tiny bit back in 1994 but like I said, hardly anyone mentioned it. Sunday after mass we drove out west to go to an Indian restaurant, but it was closed...so was the Thai place we tried next. Stacey was hungry for something spicy but for whatever reason the places I could think of were all closed. We finally lurched into a Vietnamese place that turned out to be pretty good. It refers to itself as a "Seafood Grill" but, while that's definitely their specialty, they have enough vegan/vegetarian possibilities to make it work. We just sort of rested and hung out a good bit the rest of the day, getting enough reading done for classes and enjoying a little relaxation. We ate some Peeps-type big marshmallow hearts that my parents sent. That was enough fluff for us so we didn't watch the any of the Grammy Awards broadcast.

3.
(No discernable year)
Pink and red and white confetti and streamers and balloons floating and bouncing and swooping and later to be swept by janitors who should've been home hours ago and didn't even get to watch baseball during the dance like they do during prom. Someone popped in a dirty movie but Chuck said he had something better. Turns out a few of the kids paid him to leave a big closet unlocked during the dance. Those kids told a few more kids and pretty soon there was almost a schedule and a request for another open closet. Chuck knew his limits and said no, but figured the already open closet must be booked solid. He talked to a buddy at a pawn shop who also happened to be an amateur filmmaker and the night before, the two of them turned the closet into a studio. The night of the Valentine's Dance, then, Chuck and two other custodians watched and laughed and gawked and held their breath and cheered and, for once, didn't mind staying late. The other janitor played solitaire in the corner, listening to a Hemingway novel on tape through his headphones.
The buffalo wings Chuck had eaten early on in the night took their toll, and he left for twenty minutes but told Al and Smoky, the other two watching the show, to make sure the tape didn't stop because he might need it someday. He'd been gone for six minutes when Smoky recognized a kid Chuck didn't like. "Chuck'd be pissed if he saw his kindness helping that kid out," agreed Al. Their co-worker had told them a couple weeks before to watch out for that boy, that he'd been flirting with Chuck's daughter at the Dairy Queen and just didn't seem like the kind of boy to be trusted. His daughter, of course, had no idea of her father's dislike for the boy, not that his opinion mattered much. Chuck based his dislike on the boy not on appearance - the young man kept his hair short and his clothes new and trendy - but on the fact that this boy was a senior and his daughter only 15. Had she bothered to tell her father about her date to the Valentine's Dance, he'd have said no, but she knew he and his co-workers sat in their lounge in another part of the building and watched sports all night so he probably wouldn't even know she was there. She didn't even really like Trevor, but her friends were impressed at the invitation so she went. When he asked if they could "just go hang out and talk for a few minutes," she hoped he didn't have attachment in mind. Dancing was fun and he was cute but she just couldn't like him and didn't want to pretend to, even for a few months before the inevitable college farewell. She'd humor him, drink some punch, talk about whatever, and then go back to dancing. She'd even hold his hand, since he'd grabbed it, but the sweaty palm led her down hallways and up stairs and she hoped it would let go soon. Any reader with half a mind already knows what happened next. He pulled her into the closet. Not sure whether to talk sweet or just start in on the real fun, he kissed her ear. She turned to the left and a second later, Al and Smokey laughed loudly. At 15, she was naive but not dumb about what might happen in a dark closet with a senior boy who was cute but she didn't really like. He pulled her against him and started talking, saying things that sounded like something from a Julia Roberts or Meg Ryan movie. He wasn't giving her time to reply and she felt his hands moving around but they were just on her back and only thinking about where else a boy's hands might move. She decided to let him have a kiss, on the mouth, but not with her mouth open.
She'd already had a first kiss, four months ago, with a boy she liked at the time but turned out to be not really what she was looking for. Neither was Trevor, but a couple kisses couldn't hurt and after all, she'd accepted his invitation and the corsage. His hands moved to her sides, down, and then up while she made her decision and it wasn't until they were almost back to her waist that she realized they were under her dress. She felt herself push and step back and trip, falling onto a blanket. Smokey laughed and Al gawked. Pinned and panicking, she knew what he was after and didn't want to give that to a guy who was cute enough, she guessed, but she didn't really like. She grabbed all she could see in the tiny stream of light from the door's crack and squeezed and twisted and clenched until she didn't feel the hands exploring or the legs pushing between hers anymore. As Trevor sank onto her, Smokey and Al laughed and wondered if Chuck would come back to see his little girl giving it up. "It'd be really wrong to watch, wouldn't it?" They walked over to tell the other janitor and missed her departure from the closet. The two shrugged and told Chuck he hadn't missed much of anything at all when he returned a few minutes later, just as another couple crept into the closet.
After the dance, Chuck found a quiet, urine-soaked Trevor lying in the closet, liquor on his breath, and figured the kid just passed out. “Lookit this kid’s neck,” he sighed to himself. “Passed out on hickeys an' booze. Thozer sem big, deep love bites, boy.” The boy wouldn’t come to and Chuck laughed. “Had a few benders like that myself. Let’s just git you to yer car, kid. You’ll wake up soon enough.”
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Listening to: Hip-Hop:
Paris, The Devil Made Me Do It (checked this out after re-scanning an old issue of Bandoppler I may use as research for a paper in my Af-Am Novel course)
Jean Grae, Jeanius (new outstanding female hip-hop artist)

the rest:
Bob Dylan, "Banjo Tapes"
Pine Valley Cosmonauts
De Novo Dahl, Cats & Kittens