Friday, February 13, 2009

Happy Valentine’s Day

I didn’t have the most harmless understanding of romantic love as a child. From the beginning, love was linked to petty theft and harassment. My appreciation of Valentine’s Day values has deepened since then. But I’ve been stained by our crazy love culture.

It all began with the British Invasion. In the spring of 1964, the Beatles’ hit “I Want to Hold Your Hand” revolutionized even us pre-schoolers in Southern California. A couple of first-grade girls invented a game that required the boys to pursue the girls while constantly screaming the song’s refrain. I got so worked up that I made myself hoarse. Our wild game had turned the expression of a gentle romantic wish – of holding hands with one’s girl – into an almost threatening demand. Maybe we detected an illicit energy simmering in the music. Love seemed to call for a demonic persistence. Meanwhile, each girl fled not from a skinny, red-faced boy, but from her imagined Beatles, hoping to be caught, hoping to have her hand held by her favorite. I didn’t really want to hold a girl’s hand, even if I craved this new sensation of power. I wanted to be a rock star before I knew what one was.

Then came the Kissing Bug, and the tables were mercilessly turned on me. At kindergarten recess, she suddenly started chasing the boys, trying to kiss us, and above all, me. Whenever she approached, we’d cry, “Kissing Bug!” and scramble up the jungle gym or around the slide to escape her. Her relentlessness scared me; but I hadn’t seen the worst. She lived along the route from my house to school, and she began lying in wait for me when I walked with my mother. The first words out of her mouth were a breathless string of endearments: “Good morning, Joey handsome sweetie-pie honey darling sunshine baby-doll dreamboat turtledove pookie!” She’d go on and on. Then she’d converse with my mother, and I’d walk ahead to avoid her. But suddenly, out of the blue, she’d start up again: “Hey, blue-eyes dumpling buttercup sugar-plum dearie cutie-pie bunny sweet-heart pumpkin lover-boy gumdrop!” After two weeks of this treatment I talked my mother into taking another route to school.

By first grade, I knew a girl whose hand I wanted to hold. Her backyard had a goldfish pond that encircled an old pine tree. She had a tree swing and a palatial tree house with several furnished rooms and glass windows. Her life was so glamorous that I needed to impress her when she crossed the street one day to visit me. A scheme came to mind whereby I’d steal a packet of Kool-Aid from my mother’s kitchen, and we’d eat it together behind the bushes that ran along the church building at the end of my yard. I’d thought that the grape powder would be sweet, like the drink, but intensified. I didn’t know enough about Kool-Aid chemistry to anticipate its sour taste or how it would stain our mouths. I was a vain six-year-old Romeo! It can be a grand gesture to steal for a girl, but the object needs to be something she wants, not something that sends her home spitting tart purple dye. I realized that at home the dye on my own mouth would be like a confession. I had eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I had done it for love, all for love, and I was sick at heart.

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on February 13, 2009
Customs & Rituals • Women & Men • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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