When I was around eight I had a music teacher from Romania. His name was Ion Cubicec and until today I never wondered why a south eastern european ended up in El Salvador teaching third grade private school brats, first because of the distance and secondly because most of the time he did not even seem to like kids too much. I try to see his face but I don't have a clear recollection of it anymore. I remember that at what I am guessing was seventy, his short, stocky frame was always clad in a suit and dressy shoes, every bit the old world gentleman, his grumpy voice calling us microbios .I also remember thinking that along with Mrs Peters the librarian he was the oldest person I knew, and that on special occasions instead of class we would play Calcetin or "Sock". The game was an invention of his, some sort of dodgeball with a pair of socks stuffed into each other. I loved that game so much it was the first reason I ever had to love Valentine's day, the meaning of which was explained to us by Mr. Cubicec. He told us about the letters written in blood from jail and all of that. Then we would play Sock for the rest of the hour.Besides playing sock, other Valentine bonuses were getting candy and cards from everyone in my class, and I especially remember being fond of a Care Bear one I got one year signed by a classmate with an "i" in her name,where she had replaced the dot on the "i" with a heart. I soon started signing my name with a heart stemming out of the "z" at the end of my name.
Three years passed, and while Ion Cubicec tormented a new crop of third graders I was starting middle school, being tormented by the beginning of pre teenage years. I liked an older boy, and when a couple of friends told me I had a secret admirer I hoped and prayed it was him. Then Valentine's day came and instead of cards we sent each other candy grams for a colon, chocolate grams for two colones, and rose grams for three colones. That year I got around sixty rose grams, all saying "please say yes". During recess the identity of my admirer was revealed. It was not who I had hoped, and angrily I stepped on his roses and threw away his grams in the trash can in the hall. I gave him the coup de grace by shouting "no!" to his face.I would punch me in the face now If I knew me then.
I am in New York City walking through cobblestone streets of the Meatpacking District towards Sofia's apartment on Horatio street. I am smiling thinking of all the people that I saw on the subway platform with roses or balloons, the kids I saw in front of the NYU campus, in their carefully though out "I don't care outfits" , of the girl who stood on tiptoe to kiss her college beau who she probably thinks she will marry someday , on the lips. Oh, to be young and in love!
I look through every restaurant window and see many tables of two, holding hands, shelling out big bucks to eat at Recette or similar on this special day. How nice, I think to myself, than in a city full of people who claim to be over everything, bored of the ordinary, always looking for the next small or big enthusiasm, or the next small or big disappointment, there is still a day when you drop pretenses of being too cool for everything and celebrate love. I pass a couple getting in their car, he helps her put her flowers in the backseat. Then I pass an Asian couple, more around my age. She has her armed linked through his and is smiling up at him. I think of Matt. He is fishing in West Palm Beach with his father, having left that same afternoon. I am having Valentine's dinner with Sofia and Lola, the frenchie. I am not bothered that he's not there, we had breakfast and a little gift exchange in the morning and then he dropped me off at the train station. Years ago I would have been fuming, I would have analyzed the meaning of this absence to exhaustion and then used my dooming conclusions as verbal ammo in the next fight.I would have happily procured the scenario for that fight. Not now. There is no drama, no making storms in glasses of water, there is no need to guard an imaginary territory, there are no assumptions of attacks, there is no emotional terrorism. There is nothing to prove. I live one happy day after another, and another. " Oh young Boomer, " I say to the me in my twenties," there is only one thing better than being young and in love.... and that is being in love and older."
We order Bareburgers, french fries and milkshakes. I go to bed stuffed, happy and with Lola snoring next to me in my bed.
