V-Day

At the beginning of this month, I was talking to one of my friends about why I'm not particularly fond of February. In my personal history, not-so-great things have happened in February, and various depressing Valentine's Days of the past decade are a large part of that. One V-Day in particular stands out: seventh grade - the year when receiving obligatory valentines from your classmates was no longer. I was madly, unrequitedly in love with this boy, with whom I was friends as well, which was excruciating and terrible. Valentine's Day was on the weekend that year, so the last Friday beforehand was the big day for gift-giving at school. At lunch, one of my best friends received an elaborate gift from my crush - an ostentatiously large glass penguin accompanied by a note detailing how he found the penguin in Venice, "the city of love," and so on and so forth. The emotions that I most clearly recall are devastation, and then blind rage. Not only was this guy who I adored lavishing attention on someone who wasn't me, but she didn't even want it. The very worst part of the whole experience, though, didn't happen until I got home, after spending half of the day fighting valiantly against the torrent of tears pricking at my eyes. Being friends, he apparently thought he could call and pump me for information about her reaction to his gift. While I was twelve years old, and life-consumingly obsessed with this guy, I managed to evade the questions and I'm still proud that I didn't involve myself in some deeper, more messed-up adolescent shitshow.

This is where the story does a complete 180. Because after realizing that I wasn't giving anything away, he invited me to a movie that weekend. Not alone, mind you. In all of my similarly one-sided affairs, my luck has never really swung that way. It was among our group of friends, a bunch of guys who shared sharp wits, cynical senses of humor and eclectic tastes in...well, everything, I suppose. They were all at least a head taller than me, rare for middle school, and when we went to the movies, my mother said that she knew that she didn't have to worry about my well-being because they looked like my bodyguards. So, on the day that actually was Valentine's Day, we went as a group to see Patch Adams. (I know. Looking back, I saw some pretty mediocre movies with them - The World is Not Enough, Vertical Limit. The late-90s were not a great time if you were limited to PG-13.) Regardless, the fact that the movie was kind of terrible is insignificant.

I started detailing this V-Day as the worst Valentine's Day I've ever had, but I realized that it was actually the best. My friend who received the penguin? Ascended to the heights of middle- and high-school popularity and I never really thought twice about the loss. The boys, however, are a completely different story. They made me feel like good company, like a good person to be around on that Valentine's Day, which is more than I've felt on any of the V-Days that have followed. Of all the people who've popped in and out of my life in the past ten years, I think that I miss them the most. As we attended different high schools and took different paths, we lost touch completely, something I still deeply regret, even as an adult. It is shocking and bewildering to me that people we see every day for years can become strangers. Anyway, this V-Day, I'd like to send out a valentine to PB, MF, CG, RK and GP, wherever they are and whomever they're spending the day with. Thanks.

Reading...and Watching

So I've been thinking a lot recently about the books I read when I was young, primarily because I feel incensed every time a commercial for the movie of Bridge to Terabithia. When I was in elementary school, I read constantly. At the library, I took out twenty books at a time. I would keep the books I was reading in a giant pile at the foot of my bed, growing book by book until the stack teetered precariously. Every once in a while, the pile came crashing to the ground in the middle of the night, which my mother hated.

I had special affection for books that won the Newbery Medal. I'm not sure why - certainly they're not the only good books out there, maybe it had to do with the thrill of trying to collect each one. I went through similar periods of obsession with list-y things - the presidents of the US, the fifty states - I was a weird kid. After about 1950 or so, there are some really amazing books among the Newbery winners (before that, they tend a bit more towards the educational and deadly boring) - A Wrinkle in Time, The Westing Game, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Bridge to Terabithia, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Jacob Have I Loved, I could go on, clearly. Which is a somewhat roundabout way of saying that I can't believe the way that this movie is being marketed.

The film version of Bridge to Terabithia places it along with Harry Potter and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe as a fantasy. There's nothing wrong with those other adaptations being presented as such - they are fantasies, and part of the fun of a movie based on a fantasy novel is seeing the worlds and creatures of that novel brought to life. The thing is, Bridge to Terabithia isn't a fantasy. Not even close. The book is firmly rooted in real life, to the extent that everyone who I know of who has read it remains devastated by its reality years later. The fantasy exists solely in the minds of the main characters, which makes the real-life occurrences that much more real to the reader. I guess it worries me that kids will see the movie and then be disappointed by the book, and a world where a child can no longer be swept away by the emotions of a book like Bridge to Terabithia is one of which I want no part.