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St. Hallmark's DayFebruary 14, 2006 Of course I hated Valentine's Day from the very beginning -- what intelligent, self-respecting kid of either gender would ever admit otherwise? Grade-schoolers preening because they'd got more Valentines than anyone else, or bawling because they hadn't got any. Yecchh. I drove home from the barn the long way around today so I could pick up mail. Heading into town on State Road, I noticed the unusually crowded parking lot in front of Morrice the Florist's. Huh? and almost immediately Oh yeah, all those poor schmucks buying flowers for wives and girlfriends not because wives and girlfriends especially like flowers but if flowers aren't forthcoming they'll feel dissed, dismissed, and generally ignored. Like the elementary-school girl who didn't get any Valentines, or who got only one, and that only because the teacher ordered some classmate to be nice. We won't even get into the double entendres of chocolate. So, are you giving me chocolates so I can stuff my face and get ugly and then you'll have an excuse to dump me for sylphlike so-and-so up the road? This morning I reached into my closet and pulled out a clean turtleneck -- a dark pink turtleneck. Sure, the catalogue called it rose or something like that but I'm not ashamed to have pink in my closet. I didn't, however, consciously choose to wear pink on Valentine's Day. In my bookstore days, whoever stood behind the counter commanded the stereo, and on Valentine's Day you could count on me for an anti-Valentine's set that could go on for hours. One after another I played every shit-kicking anti-love love-gone-bad song in the store. I still remember snatches of my favorites: Judy Reagan's "Dispose Of Properly," Therese Edell's "Winter of '76," Ferron's "Ain't Life a Brook" . . . Hands-down queen of the anti-love songsters was Willie Tyson. Willie Tyson put out three albums of wonderful songs in the late 1970s and early 1980s: Full Count, Debutante, and the self-titled Willie Tyson. She could be poignant, she could be inspiring (she wrote "Witching Hour"), and she could do love-gone-bad songs as well as anyone I've heard since. Lines from "Got a Feelin'" run through my head at will: ". . . Saw you pick your bay leaf from a poison ivy tree / Got a feelin' you're gonna starve to death when I'm gone . . ." She dropped out of the women's music scene not long after I became aware of it. Had to make a living, I think. I'd give a lot to have those three LPs on CD, and even more to hear her in concert next Valentine's Day.
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