Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, the day we celebrate romance.  We assume that because Valentine was sainted he must have been a good guy, right?  Historians are conflicted about who St. Valentine actually was, but one thing for sure was that he was a hopeless, and doomed, romantic.  Was he the poor soul who fell in love with his jailer’s daughter, signing his letter to her Your Valentine, before being put to death? Or was he the secret third century marrier of young couples, a practice forbidden by Emperor Claudius II because he believed that single men made better soldiers?  If so, that poor chap was also killed, but least he got a sainthood out of it.

Or maybe Valentine just got his sainthood this way, handily explained in this little syllogism:

All vegetarians are saints

Valentine was a vegetarian

Therefore, Valentine was a saint

My syllogism is flawed because St. Valentine was not a vegetarian, unfortunately, but I needed a major premise and it sounded pretty snappy.  It would have been nice to include him in with the list of great vegetarians, but the list is no less stellar without him:  Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Pythagoras, Cesar Chavez, Teresa Hsu, Leonardo da Vinci, Rosa Parks, Jane Goodall, Gandi, Confucious, Plato, Charles Darwin, Aung San Suu Kyi, Charlotte Bronte, George Bernard Shaw and Buddha, just to name few, all eschewed the eating of flesh.

The second error in my syllogism is to proclaim that all vegetarians are saints because, as hard as it is to believe, a few of us cannot lay claim to such a lofty state of grace:  Pol Pot was one nasty dude, Cain murdered his brother Abel, Charles Manson and his crowd killed many people, including Sharon Tate who was eight months pregnant.  One of his ‘Family’ was Squeaky Fromme, a fellow veg who tried to assassinate Gerald Ford.  Adolph Hitler and Genghis Khan need no introduction.  Oh, and all members of PETA .  We can’t have everything.

But I digress.  Back to Valentine’s Day.  One of my fondest Valentine’s Day memories was when the delightful Ms. S and I were single and we went for pizza at Massimo’s down on Queen West.  I don’t remember that we were feeling particularly sorry for ourselves that day but I guess the chef took pity on us.  Our Marguerita pizzas came to our table in the shape of hearts. Shoulda took a picture.

The other memory was when T and I had just started dating.  I lived above a store on Bloor street and he came over with a bag of fruit from the market down the street.  He put it on the kitchen table and then we went out somewhere.  When we came back I took the fruit out of the bag and found a little glass spice jar with a cork stopper on it.  Inside was a silver chain that was threaded through a heart which I’m still wearing as we speak, 17 years later.

Now we’re just too practical to celebrate Valentine’s Day and its pretty well fallen by the wayside where it sits with New Years and Labour Days.  We don’t get caught up in the hype, oh no not us (but don’t take my Christmas away or I’ll kill you). Our darling son takes the day quite seriously though.  In my day if you didn’t like one of your classmates you didn’t give them a valentine card, period.  We only wrote them out for friends and crush-worthy boys and we would shyly put our little cards on the desks of the deserving, red-faced and giggling, and the rest be damned.  Less popular children would leave school humiliated and empty handed.  We were so cruel.  Thankfully, today the classroom is more enlightened so that the thought of my son picking out only certain classmates to be the recipients of his cards and leaving others out would never have occurred to him.  I think that might even be grounds for suspension at the TDSB.  We diligently checked off the name of each child from the list handed out by the teacher, then we taped little heart-shaped chocolates to each card, purple for the girls, red for the boys.  Son came home from school with the same number of cards as he gave out.  In addition he received a pile of “warm fuzzies,” little notes that each child wrote in class to their friends about why they like each other so much.  One note from a little girl to my son read, “I like how you pass me the ball in dodge ball.”

Awwwwwwww.