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Everything I Need to Know About Valentine’s Day, I learned in First Grade
I always liked school, but I absolutely hated first grade. That’s because I had a very, very, very mean teacher.
Even forty years later, I’m still traumatized by memories of Mrs. Gladwill.
Normally, I’d feel really guilty calling someone out by name but 1) I’m not the only who has scars inflicted by Mrs. Gladwill and, 2) She’s dead. She died in 2008 at the age of 94. I know this because my mother sent me a link to her obituary. My mother, who is a very wise woman, knew I needed closure.
There’s no need to go into all the details of why first grade was difficult. There are just too many of those details, such as:
Watching fellow students have their ears twisted;
Sitting in class in fear of having “accidents” because, instead of giving permission to use the bathroom, Mrs. Gladwill gave lectures about “not planning accordingly”;
Having my desk put in the corner of the room so others couldn’t cheat from my papers.
But my worst memory, by far, is Valentine’s Day.
Back in the early 1970’s, before there were strict dietary guidelines in schools, Valentine’s Day parties were one of the celebrated days of the school year. Preparation began well before the actual day. By the beginning of February, letters were sent home with both the names of classmates and a list of snacks, such as cookies, cupcakes and candy, that parents were asked to contribute. We used that list of names to painstakingly address a card for every single classmate – whether we liked the person or not. But we did pick out “the best” cards and candy (every card had to have candy) for our friends.
In school, we decorated mailboxes (shoeboxes covered with construction paper) in which our Valentine’s Day cards were to be delivered. The actual celebration was to be a festival of sugar and giggles.
The day before the big Valentine’s Day party, I could no longer hide the fact I couldn’t swallow. I’d begun to worry the day before at school when eating lunch was a painful challenge. At breakfast, while I was trying to somehow swallow a spoonful of Cheerios, my mother took one look at me, told me I looked like a chipmunk and declared I had the mumps.
I wasn’t just devastated. I was horrified.
Mrs. Gladwill simply did not tolerate illness. Every day, after she took attendance, she would take a piece of chalk and scrawl the names of the absent on the blackboard. In the eyes of first graders, having your name on the blackboard was equivalent to the adult version of being forced to wear a scarlet letter. Walking into the classroom and seeing your name on the blackboard was the ultimate walk of shame.
Being diagnosed with mumps was not only a sentence to take that walk of shame, but it also meant I was going to miss the Valentine’s Day party. In the eyes of a six-year-old, life couldn’t have been much worse.
That Valentine’s Day was probably one of the longest days of my life as I spent every minute imagining all I was missing. Finally, sometime after 3:00, I heard the squeal of the school bus’ brakes as it stopped in front of my house. When my brother came into the house, he didn’t call me chipmunk or tease me for missing all the festivities. Instead, he handed me the shoebox I had so painstakingly decorated only a few days earlier. But now, it was full of Valentine’s and candy. I spent hours reading and treasuring all of the cards, even the ones I knew weren’t heartfelt.
A few days later when I returned to class, my name was one of many written in dark chalk on the blackboard. Apparently, some nameless person (me?) had come to school with the mumps and shared the virus with everyone else.
Eventually, attendance went back up and our class returned to the same, miserable status quo. But I didn’t. That Valentine’s Day taught me a lot about love:
1. Love is about the memories we treasure because, even though they sometimes grow out of difficult situations, they remind us of people and challenges we’ve overcome.
2.Love is about finding a song that will mean something to you at any age. For me, the Rolling Stones got it exactly right. “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, well you just might find, you get what you need.”
3. Love is about having a family whose support will always make the worst day a little bit brighter.
4. Love is learning to treasure all the small gifts, even ones from people who may not realize that they were giving anything of importance.
5. Love is about taking care yourself, even when others will try to make you feel as though their needs should come first.
Most of all, I learned that Valentine’s Day is much more complicated than cards, or candy or having just one special person in your life. It’s about recognizing and acknowledge everything that makes you happy.
And, over the past 40 years, I’ve been immensely blessed with people, memories and circumstances that make me happy.
Which, is why, even though I may not entirely succumb to the sappiness of Valentine’s Day, I certainly embrace the sentiments, and the lessons, it’s taught me.
A Perspective From the Backseat of a Car
I spent some very long hours in the backseat of a car when I was a child. That’s how our parents transported kids from place to place when we weren’t riding in the bed of pickup trucks without toppers.
Riding in the backseat of a car was torturous.
Even though we were never confined to car seats, neither did we have electronic games nor videos to keep us preoccupied. Instead, we entertained ourselves by reading books, playing travel games or irritating each other.
When none of those activities interested me, I simply paid attention to the world around me.
I paid attention to the landscape passing by outside, and I paid attention to my parents’ conversations. I just didn’t participate in the conversations very much.
I used to feel quite grown up when I listened to adult discussions about politics or current events or even us children. And I liked feeling grown up. At least I thought I did until one road trip changed me forever.
We were on our way home from somewhere, and we were very hungry. Knowing my parents, they were probably trying to get home before they wasted money at a restaurant when there was plenty of food at home.
But the hour was late, we were irritable and food was necessary.
So they decided to appease us, and we stopped at what I recall was a ski resort. My family walked past a long line of people waiting to get into the restaurant’s bar. But when we reach the dining area, the host gave my brother and me a disgusted look then turned to my parents and said, “It’s after 9:00. Children aren’t allowed.”
Instead of simply turning around and looking for food elsewhere, my parents chose to argue with the host. And I chose to wish I was a million miles away. The host prevailed, and we had to once again walk by the long line of people.
I honestly don’t remember if we got something to eat elsewhere that night. I do remember the discussion that I heard from the backseat of the car. My parents were frustrated they had faced discrimination because of their children.
I also remember feeling guilty that I was a child who apparently didn’t deserve to eat in a real restaurant. And I remember the look on the host’s face when he sneered “Children aren’t allowed.”
That incident haunted me for years.
I balked every time my parents headed into a restaurant that appeared to be more for adults than for children. I didn’t like going somewhere I wasn’t wanted, and I didn’t want to be in a place where people could single me out as someone who didn’t belong. And I certainly didn’t want to be in a place where people thought I wasn’t worthy or capable of dealing with the situation.
So, when someone asks “what do you think about kids in adult-oriented places?” my immediate answer isn’t “as long as they behave, they should be allowed.” Nor is it “they don’t belong.”
My answer has nothing to do with whether parents think their children are mature enough to handle a situation, whether they are trying to expose their children to culture or whether they just want to parade their children as well-trained little people in front of others.
My answer has everything to do with how the children will feel in that situation and whether they will truly miss anything by not being there. In most cases, the children are probably better served by waiting a few years.
That’s a lesson I learned from all the years I spent in the backseat of a car.
When I was there, I wanted nothing more than to move to the front seat. But in retrospect, I learned a lot in the backseat when I was often forced to observe and listen. When I was finally allowed to ride in the passenger seat, I engaged in conversations with my parents. I also had a clearer picture of where we were headed. A few years later, I even moved into the driver’s seat, where I had to make tough choices on my own. But by then, I was prepared.
The learning process was gradual, not sudden. And it all started with the knowledge gained from riding in the backseat of a car.
A Leap From The Top Step
On May 14, 1972, I got my first real lesson in fear.
That’s the day my uncle, my mother’s only sibling, was killed in a plane crash.
That’s also the day I stopped leaping from the top step.
Before that day, I loved jumping off the front steps of our small rental house on the Indian Reservation where my father worked. The joy of the 
jump was partly due to a sense of flying and partly due to the risk I was taking. More often than not, instead of landing on my feet, I’d land on my hands and knees. But the scraped knees and elbows were a small price to pay for bragging rights.
According to my brother and his friends, walking down the steps was a sign of weakness. Jumping was the only acceptable means of getting off the porch, and the jump had to be from the top step. Even jumping from one step down was considered cheating and a more egregious offense than forgetting to jump at all.
So, every time I walked out the front door, I would hurl my short, five-year old legs over five steps and land in various positions on the sidewalk. Then, I’d brush myself off and walk away with a sense of pride.
That all changed when my uncle crashed his twin-engine plane.
That Mother’s Day started in an ominous way. It began when my dad and mom, a burgeoning journalist, woke up my brother and me before dawn and bundled us into the back of our red, Ford pickup. There had been a train wreck, and we were going to the site. My dad, brother and I stayed in the truck while my mom, notepad in hand and camera around her neck, wandered off to interview people. Sitting in the truck, my imagination ran wild with thoughts of who and what Mom was encountering.
Hours after we had returned, the phone ran, and my mother disappeared for a long, long time, When she finally returned to our living room, she told us “Uncle Lowell was in a plane crash.”
My imagination, already quite stirred up from the morning’s adventure, envisioned all of the injuries he could have sustained. For some reason, I became fixed on the idea that he had, at a minimum, broken his leg. The possibility that he’d died never crossed my mind, and I don’t even remember how or when my mother finally told us. I do know that by the time she did, I’d so worked myself up about the horrors of broken bones that dying seemed like a great alternative.
I’d also decided that, based on my lack of coordination, the next time I jumped off the top step, I would most certainly break my leg.
That fear ate at me, and the next time I had to go down the steps, I couldn’t jump. I was frozen, and the ground seemed to be a long, long, long way down. I eventually jumped from the second step from the top, but I would never leap from that from the top step again.
Now, forty years later, a five year-old’s leap, or lack of a leap, seems insignificant. But it’s not.
That experience taught me about regret and about how inane decisions are made out of fear, limited information or both. It’s also taught me that sometimes we get so wrapped up in an imaginary fear that we are blinded from seeing the genuine and more critical facts.
I still fall into the trap of letting unfounded fear affect my decisions. But more often than not, I remind myself of the joy that comes from leaping off the top step and the pride that comes from going outside my comfort zone.
And then I jump.
Just So You Know 