By Barbara Anne Radtke
In the middle of a harsh winter, in the midst of times that feel so troubled, it is refreshing to have a day focused on love. The commercial development of Valentine’s Day has concentrated on exclusive love relationships, but the celebration of love comes in many forms.
I first think of the love of family. It reminds me of my dad who bought cupid dolls for his daughters from the town chocolatier. My father’s name was Conrad and, coincidentally, so was the chocolate shop in the little New Jersey town of Westwood. The packaging was a message in itself. Valentine’s Day also reminds me of my mom who always sent a valentine package every year after we left home for college. Then, there were the cards sketched with lead pencil and crayon from my nephews when they were little. My sister still often sends a card - handcrafted with talent and love. All delights for the heart.
I liked those valentine booklets of cards that we could buy when we were kids. They came with maybe 50 cardboard-like cards we could punch out of the pages. Then we used our Paige paste to glue envelopes together. In school, we left them on each other’s desks like a secret Santa message – friend to friend. There was joy in the non-exclusivity.
When I worked in an archives during graduate school, I bought one of those old fashioned valentine booklets. I punched out all the cards and signed them from the different historical persons whose papers we were curating and caring for. I left them on my boss’s desk. We had a good laugh; but, underneath the laugh, was the acknowledgement of the love of preservation of history, of remembering a story much larger than our own, which had shaped the trajectory of an archivist’s career.
Finally, this Valentine’s Day finds me cleaning out filing cabinets. I just came across all the valentine cards my late husband Andrew had sent me over 28 years of marriage. They made me smile, especially the very last one. He noted on the bottom of the card that we had bought each other the identical card that year.
This past weekend we celebrated –or endured – the paramount football extravaganza of the year, the Super Bowl. It was artfully staged in the city of New Orleans that began its earliest hours of this year with senseless murders in its streets. In the end zone, there was the message “choose love,” a message itself surrounded by controversy because of what it replaced. Yet, outside the circumstances of controversy, “choose love” still seems a pretty good intention to embrace on Valentine’s Day and beyond.
Response
By Kathy Hendricks
Like you, Barbara, my affection for Valentine’s Day stretches back to childhood. Every year my mother gave me a satin-covered, heart-shaped box filled with candy hearts. I was enchanted with my little box, even though it was the same one I received year after year. For one thing, it was all mine. Inside, the little candies carried warm messages– “luv u”, “be mine”, and “yours 4ever.” I took each one to heart.
As an elementary school teacher, I preferred the classroom Valentine’s Day party to any other holiday celebration. It was always the most subdued. After exchanging cards, the children pored over each one, scouring the messages on their valentines as carefully as a prospector might search for a gold nugget amid a pile of rubble. There is more meaning to a simple phrase than meets the eye, and the children knew it.
I recently bought an Apple watch as a way to track my physical activity and stave off the dilemma of too much sedentary time. One of its features is a daily meditation. There is a lot of self-care wrapped in the one-minute exercise. Often it is a reminder to consider someone who extended a gesture of kindness or a reminder to be mindful of my surroundings. Each one is like a candy heart for the soul. I once heard how negative experiences are like Velcro. They stick immediately in our heads and turn our thoughts sour. On the other hand, positive experiences are like Teflon. They roll right off of us unless we spend at least 15 seconds with them. The little children who pored over their valentines remind me to do the same by capturing the little heart moments that occur each day. This Valentine’s Day, dear readers, may you choose love as a way to bring a bit more kindness and warmth into your lives and into the world.
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