The Valentine enthusiast, and things my exes said

It’s unfashionable to say this, but I love Valentine’s Day and always have. During my formative years, in early grade school, Valentine’s Day was always celebrated the same way. All the kids in the class were given paper lunch bags to decorate with red foil hearts, crayons, magic markers and glitter. We wrote our names on these bags and taped them to the chalk trough beneath the blackboard. On Valentine’s Day, everyone distributed their Valentines, dropping them into their recipients’ paper bags. The rule was that each class member had to bring Valentines for everyone in the class, so everyone’s bag was full. I’d take my bag home and pour its contents on my bedroom floor and pore over them. Some were dime-store quality, some were hand-made, and usually there was a fair amount of candy: those pastel message hearts, chocolate wrapped in red and pink foil, cherry lollipops.

When I got older, Valentine’s Day retained this universal quality for me. Of course, it was nice to have a boyfriend on Valentine’s Day, but ultimately that factor never had the power to make or break the day. I loved sending Valentines to my friends, to my mother, to my grandma. As I became more interested in the paper arts and amassed an ever-increasing paper collection, I began creating my own elaborate Valentine cards, boxes and gifts. I love what I see as the essential childlike quality of the day. I love that “Valentine” is a noun. As in, I like to give Valentines to all my friends, or Charlotte will one day bring Valentines to school.

In this spirit, several years ago, I conceived a ritual that I put into practice every February 14th. NYC is an expensive city, but there are certain items that you can actually get for less there than they would cost anywhere else, and this is true of roses. On every other street corner in Manhattan is a Korean deli that sells roses by the dozen. During the right season, you can get as many as two dozen short stems, of very decent quality, for eight dollars. The same quantity with long stems, at an inflated price for Valentine’s Day, might cost twenty dollars. Some years ago, I began the ritual of buying five or six dozen in the morning and handing them out all day long to whomever I chose.

Two decades ago, I lost my virginity and spent a few miserable years with a young man by the name of Charlie. He was a misanthrope and an angry guy, and one of his favorite pasttimes involved standing at his apartment window and hurling raw eggs at designated individuals passing beneath his window. It took me years to understand just how insane and outrageous this was. At the time, it seemed like a safe way for him to dispel his excess aggression. He threw them at the loud and the swaggering, the mindless and the smug. Terminally hip young men and women were his favorite targets. He would, of course, duck back inside his apartment at the moment of impact. After the shock wore off, his victims had no idea where to look, let alone any recourse. The point of this tangential little anecdote is something he once said in the midst of this activity. “I love being the one to decide who gets hit with an egg,” he told me, as if God had appointed him to this post.

Years later, I would spin and appropriate this sentiment, taste its power. I loved being the one to decide who got a beautiful, long-stemmed rose. I gave them to street cleaners and bus drivers and little old ladies and garbagemen. I gave them to homeless people and awkward adolescents and cabbies and nuns. The most dramatic story involving one of these roses invokes another statement made by a different ex. The producer-fiance I mentioned recently once told me, “Every single thing we say or do has at least five repercussions we will never know about.” I don’t know if I believe this on a literal level, but the gist of it was driven home to me some months after my final Valentine’s Day in New York.

On that morning, just before work, I stopped at my favorite place to get coffee, which was about a block away from my office building. And as I neared the counter, I saw a woman I had met very briefly just the week before. My friend Bethany knew her from church, and we had been together when she’d seen this woman on the street. She’d introduced us, and I remembered her immediately because she had such a distinctive appearance: some deformity of the hip that caused her to walk with a cane.

Smiling, I approached her and held out a rose. “We met last week — you’re Bethany’s friend,” I said. “Happy Valentine’s Day.” She stared at me and was slow to take it, but I was used to that reaction. Strangers don’t usually walk up to us without warning and give us flowers. I didn’t think anything of the way she’d looked at me.

Months later, Bethany told me she’d run into this woman — let’s call her Jane — again. And the story Jane told her about the Valentine’s Day rose sent a shiver up my spine. Jane’s beloved father had died on the night of February 13th. The following morning, she had wandered down to the street for coffee, feeling dazed and crushed with grief. And then a near-stranger had appeared out of nowhere and handed her a rose. When that happened, she reported to Bethany, her sadness lifted and she was filled with a deep sense of peace. ”I knew the rose was from my father,” she said. “I knew that was his way of sending me a message.”