Valentine's Day memories

The day of hearts has always been a curious one for me. Falling on my birth month, it is supposedly part of what I consider my luckiest days and I have my share of stories for this day. I still remember that during grade school (and I attended an exclusive school) we had an activity in arts class where we each made a Valentine's card for our mothers. Our teachers from different grades had us bring a variety of materials including art and oslo papers, crayons, cray-pas, water color, paste/glue or whatever was available back then that allowed us to create cards by which we were to express our love to our mothers. A standard exercise in early grade school was to cut paper in the shape of hearts and to write a short message inside stating why we loved our mothers. It's not difficult to believe that many of us took these exercises quite seriously. After all, it was graded before we even got to take our projects home to give to our mothers.

High school was quite different considering our transition to puberty and adolescence had significantly affected the way we behaved, the way we thought. Valentine's Day would never be the same as those during grade school when the innocence of youth and the concept of puppy love seemed to blend in quite nicely. Crushes during grade school were quite "harmless" in that they were partly dismissed as a feeling associated with our limited exposure to the opposite sex. After all, it was still a time when 5th and 6th graders did not have girlfriends, in a manner of speaking. In high school there were so many changes including our better appreciation of girls and the female form. (Of course, there were some in our batch who adapted the female form but that's another story.)

I have fond memories of Valentine's Day parties (not the underground soirees that I have yet to write about - as soon as I could put my mind into it) in our village. Our first crushes after all were neighborhood girls, many of whom were childhood friends and were even school bus mates. I must admit that I had my share of crushes back then and have the same people as friends to this day though I have lost contact with many of them (thank you Facebook for renewing some contacts). I don't remember though that I composed Valentine's greetings or wrote to these neighborhood crushes. For me, back then it was so awkward to express something in an environment where everybody seemed to know everybody else. It was a small subdivision where we lived in Cainta and my crushes' mothers were probably my mother's friends. More "terrifying" for a young man in those days were the thought of facing a crush's father (who probably played tennis or served at the chapel with my father).

These days when I read about people as young as I were back in the day getting into tough situations (e.g., getting pregnant, eloping, etc.) I have difficulty understanding what big changes have been effected in our lives. Has our values system really changed? Is the innocence we knew back then already gone today?