p>Anybody my age will tell you Valentine’s Day wasn’t as big a deal when we were growing up. People didn’t buy expensive jewelry for their sweethearts — maybe an inexpensive little charm from places like Barr’s Jewelers, more likely gold-filled than 14K. And they certainly didn’t decorate their windows with mischievous cupids or ubiquitous hearts with an arrow going through them. Decorating the front of your house was reserved for Christmas.
People did pretty much what my dad did for Mom. He was a tough-as-nails cop, but he had a sentimental streak as wide as the Rio Grande. A terror on the mean streets of Philadelphia, he wrote songs and painted pictures of serene beach scenes or ballerinas standing on their toes. For Valentine’s Day he would always buy Mom the biggest greeting card he could find. As loving as Mom could be, she was a cynic at heart and she received Dad’s huge greeting card with a measure of skepticism. "Could you find something bigger?" she would say. Dad would get this sheepish look on his face, and out would come the gigantic candy heart.
In those days, all the chain drug stores sold Whitman’s Chocolates in various size hearts for Valentine’s Day. The smaller sizes were merely cardboard heart-shaped containers, but the really big hearts were quite fancy and wrapped in satin. Dad always bought her the largest satin heart he could find.
Mom, being the cynic she was, was not easy in accepting the heart. She would complain about needing to lose weight and could not resist reminding Dad he was the one with a sweet tooth, as she put it. In fairness to Dad, it was not easy to buy a romantic gift for Mom. Sexy lingerie was out of the question Dad found out much to his disappointment one year. He also tried flowers, but flowers reminded her of a funeral parlor. At least with chocolates he could share in the gift. Actually it was Dad, as I remember it, who eventually wound up eating most of the chocolates.
Mom always reminded him she made him an Easter basket when that holiday rolled around because otherwise Dad would make a small slit in the cellophane enclosing our baskets and the bunnies and chicks would mysteriously disappear one by one. Thereafter, Mom gave in to Dad’s taste for sweets so we would stop complaining that he was raiding our Easter baskets, but she always reminded him about it.
Dad was really the most scrupulously honest man I’ve ever known. He was a cop who obeyed the law and he scorned other cops who took advantage of their positions to park illegally or mooch free food from local eateries. The only larceny in his heart pertained to sweets. He not only engaged in petty theft of everything from Mom’s chocolate valentine to the marshmallow chicks in our Easter baskets, but he also raided the refrigerator at all hours of the night and whole pies would disappear before the morning light. Faced with questions about the vanishing sweets, Dad would remind us he grew up in a house with four other brothers and you had to develop a "boardinghouse reach" to survive.
It was amazing Dad thought he had to justify his ravenous craving for sweets. He risked his life on the job each and every day, and took care of the bills, with nary a late payment. He was the breadwinner, yet he felt in his heart that chocolates from us was something to which he really wasn’t entitled.
We, even Mom, understood the importance of the size of Dad’s gifts on Valentine’s Day. The huge card would sit in the dining room next to the huge satin heart weeks after Feb. 14 had passed, even after the chocolates were but a distant memory. It was as if the physical size of the gift represented his love for Mom. It was the only way he could express it, and she knew it.
Every once in awhile I come across one of those big satin hearts and it reminds me of my parents — the cynic and the romantic whose love endured the wear and tear of all those years. If they taught us anything, they taught us how to love.
And the chocolates weren’t half bad either.
