What’s love got to do with it?

Only everything

Photo by Rinck Content Studio on Unsplash

It’s Valentine’s Day in the mid- fifties and I am a nervous wreck. In my elementary school classroom we kids are sitting at our desks ostensibly paying attention to the teacher, but I keep looking at the Valentine “mail boxes” lined up on the windowsill. I have decorated my shoebox with construction paper hearts and white Kleenex carnations, and I have put a rectangular slit in the top for the delivery of the little white envelopes with my name indifferently scrawled on the outside and the perfunctorily chosen Valentine inside. But I am hoping for something exceptional today. I am really really hoping for something, and that something is that Billy Harris will give me a valentine that is actually meaningful and that professes his deep feelings for me. I have had a crush on him all year, and thus far have gotten no encouragement whatsoever, but today could be the day.