planted 'bout 125 peas
good job. did you get your rain today?
are you going to plant any more? i
usually plant 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 in two or three
week intervals so they don't all come on
at once.
here's a different take on valentine's day.
this sentence strikes a chord:
As children, we learn that love is a wanton emotion. Teachers encourage children to bring valentines to school, and inevitably there are several children marked for exclusion, the exquisite agony of receiving not one single card.
February 14th
Last Sunday, as Valentine's Day began gathering its barbarous impetus, Yoko Ono appeared on the Grammys and spoke tearfully about her dead husband, John Lennon.
He would want to tell us, she said, haltingly, ''that all you need is love.'' At that moment, the camera caught Madonna unawares as she openly laughed at Lennon's widow. Realizing her gaffe, Nosferatu Ritchie mouthed ''Oh, she's so sweet.''
She should not have worried: No one cared, and most would agree that cruelty and love go hand-in-hand, like Pan and Juno.
Valentine's Day is the best illustration of the ways in which we fear and mock what we need. This nominal holiday is so intrinsically gory, vulgar and divisive, it merely draws attention to its own bleak origins.
Some of you may still cherish a simple gift of weeds and a breakfast of blackened slop in bed, delivered by your hapless children; the beautiful sight of your lovers performing If I Were a Carpenter on acoustic guitar; or the thoughtfulness of your husband's or wife's gifts of blowsy flowers, lurid satin thongs or scarlet turtlenecks.
You are the brave and the few. May your mantels always be filled with heart-pocked teddy bears, ceramic "Love Is . . ." figurines, and the golden cups of Ferraro Rochers.
The artists and radicals of the 1960s, in the throes of the Beatles version of the Stockholm syndrome, used love as an ideological form of counter-Mace: Love was the daisy in the rifle barrel, the terms by which the dominant culture was countered.
If this movement failed ultimately, degenerating into the pornographic moans of Donna Summers, the "long-haired freaky people" are to be commended for realizing love is an active force, quite unlike the passive acceptance of an arrow blow, or the French idea of a coup de foudre.
(Such thinking created the very idea of the Gallic crooner, an affliction that will only die when Charles Aznavour does.)
Contemporary radicals also recognize the volatility and power of love, may recognize it is and always has been -- in its popular idiom -- a means to an end. And these radicals recognize, too, that love and hate are inextricable emotions, in spite of our symbolic labours with plastic scissors and doilies, with folded-over sheets of red construction paper.
When Al Capone ordered the machine-gun assassination of seven members of Bugs Moran's gang on Feb. 14, 1929, his message about the complexity of the human heart was sprayed over the walls of the SMC Cartage Company in an unparalleled valentine.
On this day in 1349, 2,000 Jews were burned at the stake in Strasbourg, France; in 1945, the 8th Air Force bombed Dresden; in 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini put a $3-million price tag on Salman Rushdie's head; and in 1993, a fire in the Linxi department store in Tangshan, China, killed 79 people.
These are but a few of the atrocities that have occurred on Feb. 14; the civilian murders are innumerable, and usually harrowing. Last year, April Renee Greer of Burlington, N.C., a 20-year-old who was 8½ months pregnant, was killed, dismembered, and shoved into a trash can; she had intended to name her daughter Heaven Leigh.
Among the various sentimental media tributes, TV's Cops is screening its own special contribution with this week's Lovers' Quarrels, an episode which will likely include ball-peen hammers and Ginsu knives wielded in the name of the many-splendoured thing.
As for its origins, Valentine's Day can be traced to the pagan rituals of Lupercalia, when lusty Romans would acquire teenage girls in a lottery, and win their sexual companionship for the year.
The moderate Pope Gelasius changed the tenor of the day in 496 by electing as its saint the Bishop of Interamna, who had been executed by the Emperor Claudius in 270. The first flowery Valentine's card does not originate at Hallmark, but rather is thought to have been sent by the Duke of Orleans from his cell in the Tower of London.
As a modern culture, we have laboured hard to desanguinate this ghastly event, yet the one-dimensional lacy hearts we send each other represent a negation of the martyrdom that occasioned the day, a refusal to recognize what is monstrous in an emotion strong enough to arouse its coursing alliances. Jealousy, violence, lust, and vengeance are the blood jets that sustain the actual organ, which beats capriciously to its own, particular desires.
As children, we learn that love is a wanton emotion. Teachers encourage children to bring valentines to school, and inevitably there are several children marked for exclusion, the exquisite agony of receiving not one single card.
This vicious practice extends throughout our lives. Although it is a holiday designed for people who are so morally impoverished they have to formalize their emotions (think of women who hear from their children only on Mother's Day), Valentine's Day stands as a dark line underscoring the haves and have-nots.
Those of us who rightfully tremble at the thought of this day are still forced to feel unloved in the absence of its acknowledgment. We feel compelled to rent My Bloody Valentine and simmer in our cheerless understanding of love's binary code, its ability to injure and insult us.
This day, for many, is a drive-by shooting, a random assault on our place in a world that, once a year, exacts our status as lovable or unloved.
If I were an elementary-school teacher, I would pass around a human heart among my students, and ask them to consider its relatively small weight and grotesque appearance. Celebrating love, in the conventional manner, is a form of whistling in the dark; if we had ever bloodied our hands at this age, we might not be so compelled to take lightly the gravity and grief that is the paste between ardour and its ephemeral expressions.
In 1972, a Canadian entrepreneur purchased the shattered bricks of the Chicago massacre, and attempted to sell them one at a time. No one bought a single brick, which is unfortunate, as this is the only valentine I can think of that is worth receiving, as a tribute to the grace and anguish of this day and its centrepiece: love, and all it needs.
LYNN CROSBIE
Globe and Mail Update with Canadian Press
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