In first grade the love of my life was Larry VanWye. Who knows why little girls develop crushes. Little girls don’t even know. He was a little bit taller than me, and he had chestnut brown hair he wore parted on the side. He also had dimples when he smiled. Larry was always the first one to be picked for team sports so he was either athletic or popular or both. Not only did I have a crush on him, but so did my best friend, Janie.
My friendship with Janie wasn’t quite a love/hate relationship, but it was border-line. Janie was cute, and popular, and her daddy was a principal, and she always had the absolutely most gorgeous clothes. She usually wore her hair in a long chestnut brown pony tail with a fluffy fringe of bangs. Larry loved to tease her by pulling her pony-tail.
That never made a lot of sense to me that boys demonstrate attraction by doing something painful to the object of their affection, but my mother assured me that was usually the case. Well, Larry VanWye never pulled my sandy brown pony-tail, so it was pretty obvious Janie was the love of his life, at least to me at the time. So therein rested the love/hate ambivalence I bore towards poor Janie, who never had a clue I felt like that.
As Valentine’s Day loomed largely on the school calendar, I couldn’t help myself. Maybe Larry didn’t love me, but I loved him, and because I did, born out of that unrequited love was the desire to do something really special for him for Valentine’s Day.
My mother was an artsy-craftsy type individual who was creative and inventive about such things, and she and I set about making homemade Valentines for my first grade class. There was nothing simple about them. She had bought these delicate little white paper doilies to glue on red construction paper. Then we cut out pink hearts and liberally sprinkled them with glitter.
I saved my favorite one to give to Larry VanWye. Together my mom and I made a beautiful mailbox for my cards, a shoebox covered with white butcher paper, and decorated with red and pink hearts. Proudly I bore my Valentine’s Day offering to school, hoping in my heart of hearts that today, Larry VanWye would see the love I bore for him in the beautiful Valentine’s Day card I was giving him.
What a lot of wasted hope that was. When Janie took off her winter coat and hung it on the coat hook in our coat closet, I couldn’t rein in the jealous flush that crept up my hot face. She had on this absolutely gorgeous dress. The bodice was red with puffy sleeves, and the skirt was gathered and flared out around her tiny waist, a bell of white satiny looking material sprinkled with red hearts. On her feet were tiny little Mary Jane black pats.
I’m pretty sure the only thing everybody in the room saw all day was Janie in her gorgeous Valentine’s Day attire. She reigned over the Valentine’s Day party like a princess, supremely secure of her six-year-old popularity in her gorgeous party dress.
I don’t think Larry VanWye even opened his box of cards. He and Janie played Pin the Tail on the Donkey and Hokie Pokie, pigged out on heart-shaped sugar cookies with pink frosting and red punch with red hots in it, and I pined and sulked in my desk, noting that Larry’s card to me had been a cowboy strumming a guitar singing to his horse with a “Git along little doggie,” written in bold letters across the top.