Been Burned: Still Like the Fire

When I was a little girl, Valentine’s Day was my favorite holiday. It isn’t that I had anything against the rest of the calendar. I liked outlining my hand on poster board and turning the thumb into a turkey face, the fingers into plumage with the help of 24 Crayola crayons. I liked weaving construction paper baskets in May and filling them with flowers to be left on doorknobs. I loved candy and fruitcake and home-made cards with gold star stickers and words written in Elmer’s glue sprinkled with glitter. But my favorite was always Valentine’s Day.
The year I was in love with Robert Waltz I had the biggest box for Valentine’s Day in the whole class. We were supposed to bring shoe boxes to decorate. I brought the box from my father’s new hunting boots. I wanted the biggest box thinking I would get the most stuff that way. I remember licking the tiny pink envelopes to the cards I would hand out with my classmates’ names and how delighted I was to have little boxes of Conversation Hearts to give out. Robert had Charm’s Blow Pops that went through two slots in his cards so he didn’t have envelopes, but there were two lollipops in the card he put in my box, one right-side-up and one upside-down to make them both fit. No one else got two except me. Everything about the day was glorious from the cupcakes Lisa Mooney’s mother sent, each decorated with a little Hershey’s kiss, to the recess afterwards when Robert bestowed upon my cheek my first non-chocolate kiss. Heaven.
Except for that cupid thing. My father needed those hunting boots because he was the epitome of macho and while he liked football used to joke that the seasons had nothing to do with weather or sports, but in reality were duck, deer, and fishing. If there had been bears in southwest Oklahoma, he’d have gotten a license for that too. My mother referred to my father’s gun cabinet as her husband’s china hutch and the garage was crowded with compartmentalized trunks filled with colorful feathered fishing lures and spools of monofilament. He did not particularly care for bow-hunting, but he had friends who took it up at about this point in my life, and being daddy’s girl I would often be at the lake where target practice took place.
There is a line from Chaucer about Cupid’s arrow and how it “wounds or carves.” Those are the choices. If he aims at you and you get hit, love either works or it doesn’t. But either way, your skin is pierced by an arrow. The arrowhead, flint knapped stone, moving in a forceful trajectory collides with the layers of the dermis, tearing through muscle for brakes, seeking the flesh of that most vital organ, the heart. And we stand in line, eager for this event.
Pain comes with every love even if you are happily married for fifty years, maybe especially if you are happily married for fifty years, for then someone has to die and someone has to live alone, or you go together and the love is no more, but love is never perfect for the human pair-bond. There was a thirty-year gap between the time I watched a group of bow hunters with arrows and the time I took a literature course in Chaucer, but the one thing I figured out early was that everything comes with a price.
People are never sorry for loving. They are often sorry for losing love. The woman left behind after her golden wedding anniversary isn’t sorry about the fifty years. She’s sorry no more years are forthcoming. I’ve always liked the idea of love and for my entire life, since the first grade with Robert Waltz, I’ve had my iron in the fire. Or as one guy said on his match.com profile: Been burned but still like the fire.