I despise Valentine’s Day. I loathe the tiny neon-colored heart-shaped candy with cutesy slogans. I hate the cards with love poems and Cupid and the dances and the ridiculously over-priced flowers and the heart-shaped boxes of chocolate, although I do like the chocolate. My revulsion began on Valentine’s Day in the second grade, in Mrs. Mittin’s class. I was living in Virginia, although I do not remember the city, it was somewhere near Portsmouth. I do remember I started at that school when classes began in the fall and that was the only year I was in that school system. We moved a lot. In the first grade, I attended four schools in two states. I did not stay in any school system for two consecutive years until the fifth and sixth grades.
Mrs. Mittin was my second grade teacher and the first teacher to make a lasting impression on me, albeit a bad one. At the time, I thought she was just mean, but as I grew older, I remember her as The Witch. I am guessing she was in her mid-thirties, tall, but what adult isn’t tall to a seven-year old, thin nudging plump, she wore her hair up in a bun, wore black-framed cat’s-eye glasses and she wore ugly dresses cinched tightly in the middle by a thin belt, and unattractive industrial-looking clunky square-toed shoes. She wore two expressions a pinched frown (as if she was sad at something that smelled bad) and a deep scowl (as if she were mad at something that smelled bad), and she screamed. Often. Her voice was sharp, and at full volume, a skull-piercing trill; a human steam whistle. Once the class was cutting Santa Claus in the typical red suit on a white paper background and the instructions were to leave a small bit of a white border on the edge of Santa’s suit. I strayed too far in to the red suit cutting off all of the white and she stood over my desk and screamed –wearing the deep scowl expression- because I did not leave a white border. She screamed as though cutting a Santa in all red was going to destroy the world, and that is what I remember most about her, the screaming. However, enough about The Witch.
At the end of the day before Valentine’s Day, all students taped a small brown paper lunch bag to the right front corner of their desks. On Valentine’s Day morning starting on outside rows and at the front of the class, students, on command, stood up in twos –one from each row- and walked up and down the line of desks placing Valentine’s Day cards in the paper bags and the process continued until all students doled their cards. I was in the second pair since we sat alphabetically and my last name began with a B (another story for another day). I had a card for my teacher and each of my classmates and after passing out my cards, I sat down at my desk and the class and I sat in silence while the other kids took their turns. I remember sitting at my desk, waiting in quiet anticipation for the treasure, eager for the last pair to finish. As time passed, my eagerness morphed into fear because I was not receiving any cards. Once everyone handed out his or her cards, I did not have a single card. Nada. Zip. Not a one. Shunned by my teacher and every student. I sat and watched while each one of my classmates walked by desk with out placing a single card in my bag and handed out cards to the students in the row behind me. I also remember Mrs. Mittin passing out cards, though I cannot say she gave every student but me a card and I do not believe that was the case; I think she was very selective about which students she gave cards to, while wearing her standard pinched frown. Once the task was complete, the class opened and read the cards they received. I sat there staring at my desktop in utter silence, my face burning with shame. I made an occasional humiliating glance toward my empty bag while having to endure the shrieks of joy and laughter from my classmates. I sat in disgrace and wounded pride the rest of the day and I spoke to no one as the long cruel unforgettable day painfully ended. A brutal day for a seven-year-old kid, but I did not shed a tear I was not giving my teacher and my fellow second-graders the pleasure of seeing me upset. Besides, even at seven it wasn’t the worst thing that had happened to me. A cruel day worsened while walking my sister home and discovering she had a hand full of cards from her classmates. I was not jealous of my sister, but I wondered why she was so lucky and why this happened to me?
I do not know why it happened. I do not know why my teacher with the permanent pinched frown and every student ignored me and chose not to give me a card. Nor do I think it was an overt act or a conspiracy by my classmates, although The Witch chose to snub me I was not the only student she failed to acknowledge. Maybe I bruised the psyches of The Witch and my fellow second graders when I mutilated Santa. Maybe it was because I was a child of divorced parents, which was abnormal in those days. Maybe it was because I seemed to have a knack for making The Witch shriek at full volume. Maybe they did not like the way I parted my hair or the street I lived on. Who knows? I will never know and I do not think about my own personal St. Valentine’s Day massacre often, though I do think about it every year and it is the reason I really, really despise Valentine’s Day. However as much as I hate the day, on the way home I have to buy my wife a Valentine’s Day card and re-live that horrible experience because my wife likes Valentine’s Day and if I arrive home sans card it is me that will be bruised and I probably would cry.
