You're a curious mix of ancient wisdom and cutting edge thinking. Natural forms call out to you because they leave the most to your imagination. Anyone that tries to pigeonhole you is wasting their time.
Once upon a time in the Old Canal Zone just before Valentine’s Day...
Yes, and so it starts; once upon a time just before Valentine's Day...
Roses are red,
Violets are blue…
Now lets take a trip back in time. You are a little kid living in the old Canal Zone. It is the week of Valentine’s Day and you are in Art Appreciation Class. You are in the first grade. Now take a moment to picture your room. The year could be in the mid 40’s or in the 50’s. It is a time when things were rather slow, kind of plain and rather fun.
Everywhere you go there was a large pot of gooey white paste. Now back then stamps and envelopes came without glue! To mail a letter you use a dab of this white paste to a fix the CZ 3-cent stamp and with another a couple of strokes you applied some to the envelope flap. When you address the letter you used an ink-flow pen and used a blotter to blot up the excess ink. Then you might check with the postal clerk again to make sure the Canal Zone Postal Service would accept your letter for mailing. Of course each letter and parcel was hand cancelled with what seemed like hundreds of stamps. These might say Via Air Mail, Por Avion, Handle with Care, this side up, Fragile and so on. The worst was to receive a printed little hand that was pointing saying; Address unknown and return to sender.
But hey I am jumping ahead of myself. Yes we did mail Valentine Cards to our relatives, friends and girlfriends living in the states who
we might see every other year on home leave.
Now in my day most Valentine Cards were hand made. All the kids would troop over to the Panama Canal Company Commissary and buy color poster paper at the schools supply section. But hey the required art supply went for pittance of what you pay today. This was the time of 5-cents for a loaf of bread, 10-cents for a dozen eggs, 8-cents for high test ethyl gasoline, 5-cent for a bottle of Coca-Cola and so on. It was dirt cheap to live in the old Canal Zone. Your Dad made BOO-KOO money working overtime. In those days most Moms stayed home and the TEL-A-MOM Network could really reach out and touch every Canal Zone Kid.
Yes, it was the land of milk and honey where everybody knew you name.
Now, we have gone back to the first graders who have laid out all the art supplies, color poster paper, scissors and pencils on their test. The Teacher Mrs. Murphy is explaining that we will all be making 3 Valentine's Day Cards. She says it is quite simple. All we have to do is pick out a template trace it on our color poster paper and once we have them all cut out we will use the glue to a fix them to an 8-1/2 by 11 inch poster paper, which we have already cut. Mrs. Murphy draws the different patters on the blackboard. These are the heart, the circle and arrows. She says for the first card it will be 1 – 2 – 3 and we will have it finished except the words. She then divides the class into pairs. Trying to get one boy and one girl paired off. She also says one will cut and the other will paste from the giant gooey white paste pot of glue,
which will go around the classroom.
Before we start we all put on aprons to protect our clothes just in case some little kid would have an accident with the glue.
She leads us all through the cutting of the first card and then the pasting. We cut out a red heart with those institutional size Panama Canal Company School Division scissors. You know the kind. Silver cutters and black flat painted handles. Now we also have a large cutter to get all the cards cut the same size. This you have to be very careful for you don’t want to have an accident. But it seemed Canal Zone Kids could handle the scissors and the large flat cutters like experts or would get Mrs. Murphy to help them.
Now the glue was something else. That gooey white stuff with sticks itself to everything and that is why we wore aprons. But once you got that all your fingers you had a mess. You best not touch anything! If you did it would be really messy.
After we had our cards ready we would all go to the bathroom to wash off the white gooey glue. As I recall back then nobody wore gloves for these projects. The glue was applied with a dabber brush that was inserted back into the pot after you finish.
Most times we would set aside our projects for the next day. Mrs. Murphy would then explain to us the origins of Valentine Days and read us some poems. After that we would begin to work on the words to put inside the Valentine's Day Cards.
We would start with:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
And we would then be invited to finish the poem or greetings for our cards. Some kids would write:
Roses are red
Violets are blue
I’m a stinker
And so are you!
Oh, there were many created samples made up by the kids. One that I recall was:
Roses are blue.
Violets are red,
If you think this is right,
You have rocks in your head.
Or maybe:
Roses are red
Violets are blue,
I drank from the Chagres
And now I love you.
I mean we are only scratching the surface here. Here is another example:
Roses are red,
Cabbage is green,
You're the most beautiful girl,
I've ever seen.
I mean what little girl wouldn’t love to get one of your hand made Valentine's Day Cards.
So on and on the kids wrote:
Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
I made this all up,
Whilst thinking of you.
So….
Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
Did you just fart?
No, It must have been Bart.
Now that wasn’t that nice. But you get the idea… it was all fun.
Well Holy Cow!
You all have a Happy Valentine's Day!
