Every heart, every heart
to love will come - but like a refugee.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack - a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
- Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"
Every time my February 14 birthday rolls around, my mother loves to tell the story of what the nurse said to my dad at the Good Samaritan Hospital in the days when fathers had to pace outside the delivery room - “This is the best Valentine you’ll ever get,” she said.
And for all I know, I was the best Valentine my dad ever got. Sadly, he didn’t live to share as many birthdays as I would have hoped. He died suddenly after my Sweet Sixteen.
They say a girl’s dad is her first true love, so losing mine early on broke this Valentine’s heart in what seemed at the time to be forevermore. And so, there will always be a crack in my heart, as Leonard Cohen sang, but that's where the light gets in.
Early loss has a way of imbuing all future relationships with a keen sense of their intrinsic fragility and inevitable decline.
But it’s melancholy with a bright side - such awareness is all the more reason to get right here in the right now and love whomever or whatever is in front of you, whether it’s your partner or a friend or the majestic mountains we call home.
These are what grow and sustain the heart. Otherwise, the opposite danger is an overly-armored heart.
As for enduring valentines, my dad is the one who introduced me and my sisters to Yosemite National Park and the Eastern Sierra – thus beginning my lifelong love affair with the region where I live today.
My first trip south on Highway 395 from Tioga Pass was in the back of the ’71 VW camper van my dad drove in those days. It later took me through my university years in Berkeley and future Sierra camping trips.
For me, valentines have never been so much the stuff of Hallmark greeting cards or romantic dates, but the enduring memories that enrich the heart, whatever the outcome with the beloved.
As for traditional valentines, yes, there have been the dewy oh-so-pale-pink long-stemmed roses delivered the old-fashioned way in elegant boxes to my job in San Francisco long ago. There have been beaus who romanced me over candlelit meals from the California wine country to the pinon-scented kiva fires of Santa Fe (the most romantic, I would have to say, being the time I was in Mendocino with a college love for my 1986 birthday, and we got rained in with all roads out closed!). And there was the recent love who surprised me with two dozen roses at my doorstep not long after our break-up – a dozen for my birthday and a dozen for Valentine’s Day – a gesture that cemented what has become an enduring friendship.
Because it turns out, according to a birthday card I once got, that one of the legends about St. Valentine is as much about agape (friendship) as it is about eros (romantic love).
Valentine, an early Christian in Rome who is remembered for his kindness, made friends with the jailer’s blind daughter while he was in prison. She in turn brought to him notes and flowers from the children who adored him. Whenever possible Valentine replied to the notes – giving rise centuries later to the tradition we know today. When Valentine prayed for the jailer’s daughter just before his execution on February 14, she regained her sight. He is said to have written a farewell note of friendship to her, signing it “From Your Valentine.”
But my best valentine, of course, is the gift of life that my mother gave to me on that day of hearts. Thanks, Mom.
