My Funny Valentine

For Valentine's Day I like to begin early. My front sun porch features very inexpensive colorful seasonal bags from Walgreens that fit nicely into my many little windows so when one walks by they see alot of hearts through the glass. Plus I can light up my red chilli pepper lights that remain there all year long. This year I shopped at the 32nd Street Farmers' Market for items to put in some of those same bags that then got put on all the desks of secretaries in my section of the office. I got my partner red tulips there, too, I send out - by email and by snail mail - numerous special Valentine messages as I do for some of my other favorite holidays, like Halloween.

While just having a day in the dead of winter to celebrate is reason enough for me, I sometimes like to revisit the body of history around a holiday so today I did go to Goggle and did some research. There always seems to be the same argument about christian holidays coming from pagan celebrations and, of course, there's the standard criticsm about how this holiday has been commercialized - combined with the facts about how many cards are sent, roses bought and chocolates given. One can go around the world with a holiday and today I learned that Valentine's Day is frowned upon by those in power in Iran. Big surprise!

Here's what is attibuted as the first recorded use of "roses are red" in a poem; it's from Edmund Spencer's The Faerie Queen (1590)

                  She bath'd with roses red, and violets blew,

                 And all the sweetest flowres, that in the forrest grew.

Whether it originated with a fertility feast or a saint sacrificing his life - to me - is not the point and I am one of the first crass opportunists to preach "Shop Local for your Sweatheart this Valentine's Day!"

IT IS THE DEAD OF WINTER - though this year we have been quite lucky on that score - so LET'S CELEBRATE just knowing days will get longer and flowers will bloom gives me reason to go on.

Plus, why don't all those statistics include the ones about how many mothers' were remembered by their sons, how many spouces showed they appreciated their partners, how many stamps helped keep the U.S. Postal Service going one more day? 

And, as "one day at a time" is my mantra on this and every other day, here's some of our very own late great Waverly Village poet to end with, since what would 2/14 be with some poetry!

This is how her poem, TODAY, begins and ends:

TO-DAY

Is there but emptiness from sky to sky;

A hollow where we pass,

Along the simple grass?

Stirs not some intimate foot as we draw nigh?

Or is To-Day grown but a lantern light,

That throws at the dark’s edge,

Upon some village hedge,

A pretty red, then dwindles into night?

To every age some mystery all its own,

That makes it dullest air,

A something hushed and fair;

Down every age some breath of Beauty blown;

Each day is but a pool within the grass,

A haunted, gusty thing,

Of ancient fashioning,

Where earth and heaven do meet as in a glass.

“In Praise of Common Things: Lizette Woodworth Reese Revisited”

Contributions in American Studies, Number 102

Edited by Robert J. Jones, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, 1992

HAPPY VALENTINE"S DAY TO ALL