Category: writing

february 14th: it’s just another day

february 14th: it’s just another day

First, listen.

I was twelve years old when I had my first Valentine’s Day experience. My boyfriend and I were to exchange gifts at my locker between classes, and the only reason I’d even gotten him something was because I’d been tipped off that he’d gotten me a gift. That gift, as it so happened, was a pug stuffed animal and a box of chocolates accompanied by a card declaring his eleven year old love for me. When I handed over my gift, two boxes of Sweetheart candies and an accompanying card with similar declarations of love, he was disheartened. He hadn’t yet learned the art of playing it cool and had noticed that he’d spent a considerably larger portion of his allowance than I had. It was middle school, I wasn’t making a lot back then. Even at twelve years old I was annoyed by this interaction. I didn’t mean to spend less than him, but I also didn’t care how much he had spent on me. (And, let’s be honest with eachother, how much did that pug really cost? C’mon.)

I can’t be completely certain, but that entire Valentine’s Day exchange may have been my saving grace; the thing to keep me from being a person who avidly, painstakingly cares about February 14th. And it is just a date, though I can’t blame you if you’ve been duped by it. For years and years, it has masqueraded in red and pink flowers, hearts, diamonds, fancy dinner plans, all to fool unsuspecting people into thinking that it was really a thing. It has effortlessly fooled couples into slaving away to put on a good performance on this single day of the year and has tricked single people into thinking it suddenly matters more that they’re alone than it would have on, say, February 13th. That’s quite a power to harness for a single date on a calendar.

Valentine’s Day derives from various tales of martyrdom, and was only celebrated for love and romance in the 13th century when people concluded that February 14th was the first day of mating season for birds. And like Halloween before it, we as a civilization have taken a day that meant something completely mundane and mutated it into something kind of… well, worse. And not only that, but it has, in turn, made people feel sad and dejected. I mean, to the point where a movie called How To Be Single is being released on Valentine’s Day weekend, because they are hoping to prey on all of the single ladies in the world womp-womping around because they don’t have any plans.

That’s the funny thing about Valentine’s Day. It’s supposed to be this day about love, right? The priest (Saint) Valentine defied Emperor Claudius II and continued to marry young lovers even though marriage had been outlawed in Rome (because single men made better soldiers than married men, natch!), only to be caught and executed for his crimes. Love, right? He died for love! I guess!

So I still put my love to use. Romantic love isn’t the only love, you know. And it’s the far more elusive form of love in my life, anyway. Instead, my dad has been my Valentine for the last few years, because he’s pretty cool and sometimes he sends me flowers that show up a day late, because why wouldn’t they? On Valentine’s day, I choose to revel in the card my Nana picked specifically for me, and the little candy that she attached to it. I choose to swoon over my dog because she’s really fucking cute and she loves me back no matter what. And I choose to set up dinner plans with a group of girlfriends because the power of female friendship is beyond measure. 

Getting drunk on pink wine and guacamole with a bunch of friends are the plans you wish you had last Valentine’s Day. And there might be a friend or two who will drink too much and begin to lament about better V Day’s gone by… let them. Order more wine for the table, eat more carbs than you’ve eaten in the last month, roll your eyes at all of the loved-up couples sitting at the surrounding tables (because, ugh, PDA). Get drunk! Throw condoms around the bar! Swipe your Tinder (or Hinge… or Bumble… or OKCupid, if u nasty) screen with reckless abandon! I’m telling you, these are the makings of the best February 14th you’ve ever had. Trust.

Valentine’s Day is only real if you believe it. So I choose to put it out to pasture with all those other things people tried to make me believe were real, like velour track suits, Ed Hardy in general, “meninism”, Windows phones, rainbow-colored armpit hair, and YOLO (wishful thinking).

Just set a reminder for the morning of February 15th. You’ll probably have a headache from all the rosé you were drinking, but those recently discounted heart-shaped Reese’s peanut butter cups aren’t going to eat themselves.

Featured image by Elmo Hood
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“I have so much I want to tell you, and nowhere to begin.”

“I have so much I want to tell you, and nowhere to begin.”

First, listen.

I woke up on January 27, 2010 to learn that J.D. Salinger had died. I was 22 years old.

Throughout the course of the day, I received messages from family and friends checking in to see how I was doing, if I was okay. I guess you can say I was the walking cliche who had read The Catcher in the Rye in high school and felt forever changed by it. But it wasn’t because I connected with Holden Caulfield. In fact, a lot of his ideas of the world bored me and made me roll my eyes. I have my cynical moments but I’d like to think I see the world with even just the thinnest veil of optimism. It was deeper than the main character, deeper than this beautiful setting of New York City, a place I hadn’t truly tapped into yet as a teenager in the suburbs of Long Island. There was something in the way that Salinger wrote that grabbed me by the metaphoric lapels and shook me. Perhaps it was the conversational way that he told his story through Holden’s narrating that made me feel like maybe he was talking directly to me. Or, to be less dreamy-eyed and naive about it, maybe I felt as if we might have a nice chat, J.D. and I, if ever he stopped being a recluse in Cornish, New Hampshire. (I held out hope for this very scenario until the day he died.)

I constantly wondered what it might be like to live inside his head, to have written these characters who are just a step or two outside of being mentally and/or emotionally stable. I liked it, loved it as a young person dealing with her own imperfect mind and emotions, with a family that was coming apart at the seams. The Caulfields weren’t perfect. And, with further reading, I learned that the Glass family was even less perfect than them.

I have this story I always tell of when I was 11 years old and my parents had just begun their trial separation. One of my teachers asked the class if our parents were divorced and I don’t know why she did this, I really do not. Maybe she was making some point about statistics? She was a math teacher. Or… maybe she was going through her own stuff? She was a bit weird. But I saw a number of kids raise their hands. Two, at first. Then three, four, five. I sat there with my hands under my thighs, as if to fight the inherent urge my 6th grade body had to be honest about my life. These jokers were all lying. There was no way the most popular girl in our grade had divorced parents! How could she have ever gotten to be so cool? You know? Because my parents fought and I didn’t sleep very well and I was nervous around boys and sometimes I cried for no real reason. Those were not the makings of a popular girl. Not that my lack of popularity was the fault of my parents’ impending divorce, but I assumed, at the time, that it certainly would not help. And so I had no other choice but to assume everyone else was lying and looking to embarrass the sole person (me) who really did have divorced parents and admitted it in front of the class.

The point is, it took me a long time to realize that the strange badness that I dealt with wasn’t just mine. It wasn’t just me. And figures like Salinger were able to help me realize it.

Plus, his writing. His writing. It’s so good in that it’s not overwrought with pretension and yet you feel like you’ve gained something new; perspective, amusement, sadness, introspection.

Senior year of high school, I was writing college admission essays and one of the schools asked for the applicant to write an extra chapter for the book of the applicant’s choosing. It could have been anything in the world. I chose, of course, to tack a chapter on to the end of The Catcher in the Rye. Post-revelation that Holden had been in a mental hospital since Page One. (I digress here but I feel I have to tell you about the chapter: Holden sitting on a bench in the hospital’s courtyard beside Jane Gallagher who had surprised him with a visit. They talked about Allie and Phoebe and their old days of playing chess, and then a light rain started to fall, and everyone else scattered inside, but not Holden, and not Jane. They sat in the rain with Holden’s hand clamped onto hers and he closed his eyes and leaned his head back and felt a little sliver of peace for once in his goddamn life.) This was an ungraded assignment but I went to my AP English teacher and asked for feedback. It was over ten years ago but I’m assuming I’ll never forget her lilting cursive in red ink telling me that my extra chapter sounded eerily identical to something Salinger himself could have written.

(Though, I imagine Salinger might have ended it with a suicide attempt, if you want to know the truth.)

Maybe that’s the proof of how he helped me. He didn’t grow up with this book like I had. I saw Holden finding peace, much like the way I, at seventeen years old, was hoping I would find it. And somehow, between the lines of phonies and prostitutes and children running through a field of rye, I was able to see the glimmer of possibility.

Anyway… Thank you.

empathy and the city

First, click.

This evening I was changing from the M to the G at Court Square. This entails a rush between two separate ends of a train station. In the morning, there is a moving walkway that goes from the G to the E/M, but evenings, we are left to our own devices. We must walk. We must hustle.

On this particular evening, I found myself with a bit more pep in my step, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was the mounting headache, or that my day had started so incredibly early that all I wanted to do was get home at a decent hour and maybe go directly to bed. It could have been that I wanted to try to beat a new roommate back to the apartment, a roommate who does not understand how valuable it is for me to be able to relax on the couch alone to watch an episode of Jeopardy over my pathetic single-girl dinner. Whatever it was, it had me weaving quickly in between strangers, trying to anticipate whether or not they might veer right so I could step left.

I came up on a man who was very clearly elderly. He walked a bit slower, he had long white hair and a ball cap on. As I stepped around him to hustle past, I glanced down and noticed that his shoe was untied. A silent siren went off in my head. Tell him! Tell this man his shoe lace is untied! But I didn’t! Because I was in a rush. Because in New York we are constantly in a rush.

And so I moved on past him and I ran down the steps because I thought the train was leaving. It wasn’t. I grabbed a seat and hugged my bag to my chest and I worried about the man and his untied shoe.

But lo and behold, look who’s come onto the subway car to sit right beside me? That same man.

I sat with my eyes ahead, and I tried to will away my headache, and I hoped and hoped that he had stopped to tie his shoe. I didn’t check, I don’t know why. Would it have been odd to point out that his shoe was untied, as we sat together in an unmoving train car? And so we carried on this way, sitting in close proximity, my peripheral vision giving me the perfect angle to see his fingers rubbing together in what I had supposed to be an anxious sort of way. Because in New York we are constantly in a state of anxiety.

As the train lingered on through Queens and into Greenpoint, I had my hopes set on getting off at the same stop as this man. I could check his laces and give him the mental a-okay to go on his way. But at Nassau Avenue, he pushed out of his seat and walked to the door, and my eyes fell to the floor where his shoelace remained untied and his feet shuffled and my heart jumped into my throat hoping no one would step on the rogue lace. I swallowed back my self-hate for the moment as I tried to find him through the closing door. I kept willing him to stop and tie his shoe. Please, please, please. But I’d lost him. Perhaps because he’d knelt down to fix his shoe?

And there he was again, the lag in his reappearance in the train car window just long enough for someone to have retied their shoelace. I felt a little wave of relief, but I felt a lot of sadness. We continued on, further into Williamsburg, and my eyes were stinging with fresh tears. It was something so simple as telling someone their shoe was untied, and yet I didn’t have the time. Right? I didn’t have the time to be kind to a stranger. That’s what it all came down to. And it really broke my heart.