Read Mansi Bhatia's essay, How Deep Is Your Love?

Read Vickie Jenkins's essay A Valentines Day Love Letter

Mr.Deprado,

I think I have mentioned this in past letters, but you are, in some ways, responsible for the part of my life that I sometimes call a gift, sometimes call a joy, sometimes call horror and sometimes stress, but usually refer to as my vocation.

Teaching. I am a professor at a medium-sized college in San Diego where I interact and learn from an incredible diversity of students–this of course is the politically correct way of saying that the students at City College are from every walk of life, of color, class, social standing, diversive group, subversive group. They are anarchy aspiring, mainstream loving, crazy dreaming, artists, athletes, writers, mathematicians, engineers social workers, nurses, beauticians, auto mechanics, and whatever else. For now, we are safe at the "college," a place where it is okay to wait in hopeful expectation for our dreams to materialize into more than just words dissipating into an exhale of blue smoke. It is a foundational place bigger than the life dream your parents set for you, or what your counselor or High School teacher did when they gave you an aptitude test and told you that you had "people skills" (what are people skills anyway?). Dreams are bigger in this place because they belong to us; they are our own.

How do these dreams that are incubated in college get born, and why are they important? Why do we even bother with them when we can barely find an affordable place to live, or a decent job, good food, and trustworthy friends? Why do we dream when we can just go to the movies, turn on the X-Box, or (dare I say it) troll the internet?

I say it’s because dreams mean possibilities, and possibilities are hopes with real teeth.

The farthest-reaching dream of all is love. I think I realized this in eighth grade when I first got really into music, and we would spend hours after school at the used record shop on Throckmorton Ave picking out albums and putting the covers on our walls. It was the first art we could call our own, and we were the sharpest critics. On the flip side of these great works of art were the lyrics to the songs, and it wasn’t long until Todd and I realized that every song was about just one thing. Love. Even then, when our favorite band was "The Cars," and even through their sporadic beats and funky vocals, they were singing all about the difficulties and that "magical" quality of love.

I dare to say that the most relevant, most evidential, most powerful dream of all, is love–I say this with caution, knowing that I am newly married to the one I am supposed to be married to–a dream come true for certain, and I know that it might not be like this for everyone, but at some point in all of our lives we have known love.

The cool water in the river behind your house on that hot day

Walking through green fields in the sunlit morning

Kissing a girl for the first time ever and then spending all the next day in a mystical fog kissing your hand trying to recreate the feeling

That feeling when you like her and she likes you

Winning the game and then hugging your teammates, guys you have hardly known before this, men who you will be inexorably linked to the rest of your life through tales of glory and truth

Getting something down on paper

Giving, giving, giving

Reading the first lines of your favorite book again and again

Playing Monopoly with your parents when you are a kid, landing on free parking, and believing that the money is real

Finding the one you will love forever

Her finding you back

All of this, all of this is love, and the forms of love are extensive and beautiful and terrible, but they last and metamorphosize constantly, changing and recreating our lives.

Love is the dream that is real, even when we have experienced the world of it, the end of it, the betrayal of it; it is evident that love remains inside of everything. A dream that comes true and true, it wants to exist, it does exist, it is all around us all the time, and yet, so often, we don’t allow it to touch us.

As a culture though, we try, we even set aside a special day for it–color it red and dish out in chocolate to everyone! We bake billions of pieces of sugar together that form tiny candied hearts, and put them in bowls in our offices and classrooms, and the hearts carry messages that portray our deepest affections to one another, stuff like: "have a heart," "you’re mine," "kiss me." We give them away like little secrets straight from our hearts.

And that’s only the beginning–this holiday is a rare chance to actually show love to everyone around you, and to someone in particular. We call it Valentine’s Day, but what really is this day anyway?

Valentine's Day is a special day that has been set aside in order to honor "love". It is most famous for being a time of celebrating "romantic love". So as the 14th of February approaches, many will begin plans to find that right card, order those flowers, or make reservations for that candlelight dinner. Yet, few will stop and ponder along the way why this date is singled out, or just whom this Valentine guy was that he should have a day named after him.

Who was Valentine? This question is not an easy one to answer. Depending on which book you read, you might find one author making the case that there were two different men named Valentine whose lives were mixed together to form one legend, and another arguing that two different legends arose about the same man. Even still another author might say that there were three men named Valentine.

Here are other synopses of different stories...
 

• Valentine was a Roman priest who was martyred during the persecution of Claudius the Goth around A.D.  269 or 270 and buried on the Flaminian Way.

• Valentine was a bishop of Terni martyred in Rome.

• Valentine as a young man, though not yet a believer in Jesus, helped Christians during a time of persecution. He was caught and put in jail, became a believer there and was clubbed to death for this on February 14, 269. While in prison he is said to have sent messages to friends saying, "Remember your Valentine" and "I love you".

•  It is said that Valentine was a priest that secretly married couples, defying the law of Emperor Claudius who temporarily forbade marriages.

• Valentine was imprisoned for his faithfulness to Jesus and refusing to worship pagan gods. Making friends with the jailer’s daughter, he is said to have seen her healed through prayer, and on the date of his execution (Feb. 14th) he is said to written her a note signed "Your Valentine".

Here’s one version peculiar enough for me to believe:

    The 14th of February was set apart as the special day to remember Saint Valentine. This was one day before the Roman feast of Lupercalia, a pagan love festival. In 496 A.D., Pope Gelasius changed Lupercalia from the 15th to the 14th to try and stop the pagan celebration. The church realized that there was nothing wrong with celebrating love; only the pagan elements insulted God. Lupercalia was done away with, but it had left its mark on Saint Valentine's Day. Valentine had become known as the patron of lovers.

Part of the Roman festival of Lupercalia was the putting of girls’ names in a box and letting the boys draw them out. These couples were supposedly paired off for the whole year. A similar practice was begun in the fourteenth century. A sweetheart was chosen for a day by lot. This was done to correspond with the belief that the springtime mating of birds took place on Valentine's Day. Messages sent between these randomly chosen pairs were a forerunner of the modern Valentine's Day Card. Specially printed cards for Valentine's were just becoming common by the 1780s. They were a big hit in Germany where they were called Freundschaftkarten, or "friendship cards."

There we have it. I guess we are all martyrs in some sense, desperately loving or trying to love. But these dreams–the greatest of which is love–they can all be real. Just look around you and unpeel the thick outer layer you have grown. Be a little bit vulnerable, too. Luckily, you probably won’t be killed for it, and you might even get one of those sweet little tarts: "Be mine," "steal a kiss," or "you are free!"

So, should we acknowledge Valentine's Day? Absolutely. It is, when you think about it, a day celebrating a dream come true. Though we're not quite sure who Valentine was, we certainly know that love is the most important dream and the most important reality. 

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