I hope you and yours have a great Valentine’s Day. When you have children you get to watch as they assemble different pieces of parcel with names scrawled on them to give out in a giggling school room. When I was a kid, I remember the Valentine’s game being much more cut throat and filled with a great deal of anxiety. Unlike the way we keep our children emotionally bubble wrapped today, Mrs. Weiler’s second grade was a constant dog fight. Cement walls with posters of planets on them herding and corraling a constant cacophany of legislators and lotharios. There were no rules then that everyone had to receive a Valentine’s day card. Some unfortunate boys and girls got only two or three. The lucky one’s, who possessed the perfect mixture of charm, good looks and sway would receive so many paper hearts that there would be too many to fit all in their desks. Some of the over flow would flutter out onto the ground, leaving perfect, imperfectly drawn hearts littered across the cold floor. The way to ensure that your ego wouldn’t be short changed on the day of days was to start making side deals about two weeks out. You would tell a girl, “If I give you a Valentine, I won’t give one to –insert name of girl’s mortal enemy here). Girls would vote as a Bloc as to decide who would be blessed with their romantic autographs. Their was romance. We may not have known the actual feeling of love and lust but we went through the motions of how we thought it should look and what it should say and we proved what we knew with red ink. We would draw hearts and write “True love aways” inside the creases of the cards. Our nine year old son has been instructed to give a Vantine or as he called it until last year a “Valentime” to each member of the class. That means even boys would be Valentining boys. There was nothing embarrassing about it because all of the romance has long since been removed. Instead of hand crafted love letters with intricate scissor work and sometimes multiple crayon colors; everyone in the class gets a factory printed Valentine’s from the folks at “Hot Wheels” or “Sponge Bob”.

Neither my wife nor I had the heart to tell him that every kid had the same set of guidlines and rules as he did so it wasn’t surprising he came home the afternoon of the 14th with 22 Valentine’s Day cards. Why bother. Just let everyone be a winner.

Looking back I smile thinking of the numbers game Valentine’s Day became. I wish I could sit down with a six or seven year old me. I wish I could tell myself. RELAX. This hitting for average thing is for the birds. Sit back and wait for your one great pitch and smash it over every fence you ever see. I am 41 year’s old and I have just one Valentine this year. I have had one Valentine every year for nearly a decade. Even with only one card, there is no room for anything else to fit inside the school desk behind my ribs. I no longer lobby or cajole or sway or deal or cheat or steal or lie or wander. I have taken out my colored markers and sworn their allegiance to only one flag. The Flag. My wife. My life. I wish I could tell all of you that the safety in numbers theorem sounds nice and seems like a perfectly pragmatic safety net as the calendar page turns towards March. I must also let you in on an enormous secret. Having one Valentine is the greatest feeling in the world. Knowing in your bones that there will never be another. There will never be another’s handwriting on any of your walls. There is no greater love. Laying in bed next to my wife and just looking at her perfect face I often wonder, “How”? How out of the entire world’s population did I happen to wind up sharing a life with the one person who knew exactly how to live my Valentine. Her notes are always handwritten in the most beautiful cursive. Her hearts that she draws are many different colors and only I can see the treasures that lie beneath them. Our love can be seen by all but somehow stays entirely private. I hope for one day you can slow everything down a little bit. Stop the hustle. Leave the traffic. Let go of the wheel. Stop pushing. Stop pulling. Be still and let someone land, right there at your desk.