Valentine Cards and Comments

Several years ago I listened to Garrison Keillor, of Prairie Home Companion fame, as he told about children at school around Valentine’s Day. He’s a master of story telling because the “meat” for his presentations comes from deep within his heart and mind.

He reminded me of Grade School and how everyone would prepare for the event. I can remember going to the store with my mom to purchase a package of those “el cheapo deluxe” cards to distribute to my classmates. You know the ones; they had 5 or 6 small “cardboard punch outs” that had to be cut with a good pair of scissors to keep from tearing them. You had to remember all the names of kids you wanted to share with and write those names on the front of the cards.

Invariably some of the kid’s names never seemed to be remembered by the others as the teacher handed out the stack of greetings from all the other children. Some of the really popular kids had bushel baskets full, some got four or five; while a few of us got one or two.

It was a painful acceptance of reality, a feeling of exclusion, a part of life that was to be expected when dealing with others. As in the related story, my the teacher would attempt to correct the disproportional windfall by erasing one child’s name, and writing in its place my name. Until you have received a card where such an obvious attempt has been made it is difficult to explain the hurt feelings. What I have put here in one sentence, Garrison was able to turn into a 15 minute trip down memory lane.

I was reading some of the more popular blogs during the week, noticing that there were several comments; observing the numbers inside the parenthesis, on some of the really top notch blogsites the numbers within the little brackets were close to obscene. I thought for a moment, how I could harvest some of those comments and transport them onto my site, put a small number to replace the zero. I suppose it would have been nice for my old grade school teacher to have continued bolstering my confidence, just a little longer.

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