On Sunday, the tenth, I attended the Roundtable at the Grange Hall, sponsored by the Anderson Valley Historical Society (part of their Annual Meeting), with a friend and neighbor who was kind enough to drive me there from Ukiah. He being three years my senior, both of us were extremely impressed with the wealth of information that was disseminated about life in Anderson Valley during the 1950’s and 1960’s, told through the various stories of residents at that time. My own memories being limited by my youthful age at the time (six through nine years), it was fun to hear about different per-spectives on life in the Valley from people who were old enough to get into some real mischief from which my brother and I, having a respectable family reputation to uphold, were forbidden. The event was further enhanced by an extremely generous spread of appetizers and desserts, lovingly prepared by members of the Historical Society, and I think I can safely say, along with our fellow attendees, that “a good time was had by all.”
One of my memories of attending the primary grades in Boonville that I neglected to include in my earlier articles concerns all of the hoopla surrounding Valentine’s Day. Apparently, it is as big a deal with elementary-aged children now as it was then, as evi-denced by the “On the Streets” interviews in Sunday’s Ukiah Daily Journal, in which six elementary-aged students were asked the question by Brian Maneely: “What do you like about Valentine’s Day?” The children responded in much the same fashion that I would have when I was their age, indicating their pleasure at exchanging Valentine’s Day cards between their classmates, friends, and family members. One of the main things I remem-ber about the occasion when I was their age was the ferocity with which all of the moms designed receptacles for their children’s Valentines from school, consistently trying to outdo each other with their elaborate creations put together with red, white, pink, and lavender hearts made from corrugated and construction paper, cardboard, and glue.
As the years progressed, after my family moved away from Anderson Valley in 1959, my enjoyment of the whole Valentine’s Day scene became disenchanted, my receipt of a box of conversation hearts with a note indicating a proposal of marriage from one of my fourth grade classmates in Dixon notwithstanding. He was also a fellow piano student (whose flawless rendition of Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata inspired my own “pathetic” attempts at playing the piece even remotely as well as he did). As I eventually entered the dismal dating history of my teen and adult years, my contempt for the occasion increased tenfold, to the extent that my favorite Valentine’s Day slogan (which was actually printed in a Hallmark card during the 1980s) became, “A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and I don’t need a Valentine!”
Artists throughout history have made their own contributions to the occasion: Beethoven’s Apassionata Sonata, Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, and Gustav Klimt’s painting The Kiss, to name a few. Being the cynic that I have become over the past half-century, my favorite artistic representations of the occasion include the more painful aspects of love, notably Kahlil Gibran’s essay “On Love,” from his book The Prophet (www.katsanddogz.com/onlove.html) and Judith Viorst’s poem “Mending” —
(www.brownielocks.com/childrenspoems.html).
Cupid (Roman), aka Eros (Greek), was the son of the goddess Venus (Roman), aka Aphrodite (Greek), who, when he fell in love with Psyche, a mortal, caused his mother to put her through the most stringent tests to prove her love for him, after she had ignored his admonishment to not gaze upon him while he was sleeping, lest he leave her and never return. Whereas my relationship with my late ex-Mother-in-Law was hardly that stringent, the story does tend to put both Cupid and his mother in a highly suspicious light, in my opinion.
But for those of you who still believe in true love, having experienced it firsthand, and plan to enjoy Valentine’s Day at home on a first date, with a long-term partner, or anything in between, I humbly offer you my Top 10 list of favorite romance movies, some older, some newer, all of which (spoiler alert!) have a happy ending—you will not find a single Nicholas Sparks movie in the bunch:
1. When Harry Met Sally (1989)
2. While You Were Sleeping (1995)
3. Frankie and Johnny (1991)
4. Dying Young (1991—filmed in Mendocino)
5. Overboard (1987—filmed in Fort Bragg, at Noyo Harbor)
6. Defending Your Life (1991—of course)
7. The Owl and the Pussycat (1970)
8. No Strings Attached (2011)
9. Working Girl (1988)
10. Leap Year (2009)
If your Valentine’s Day date extends through the weekend, and you and your date can handle R-rated (for “raunchy”) entertainment, I highly recommend Comedy Alley, the comedy show on Saturday night the 16th at the Ukiah Valley Conference Center at 200 South School Street at 8:00 p.m. (doors open at 7:00 p.m.). I attended the last one a month ago with the aforementioned friend and neighbor, and we had a great time. ¥¥
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