A Valentine

breathes there a lad with heart so dead who never to himself hath said "that's the girl for me"?

"Breathes There a man with soul so dead that in his heart has never said, This is my own, my native land ..."

The foregoing is a garbled version of a piece of American writing I chanced upon 50 years ago at Emerson School in Fresno, and immediately loved for its simplicity, truth and warmth: loved so deeply that I found it impossible not to invent parodies of it, which nevertheless did not diminish my admiration for the original:

"Breathes there a man with foot so flat that in his flight from the watermelon patch has never said. 'This is my own, my very own watermelon, farmer. Don't shoot a good American boy doing his plain American duty!'"

Or: "Breathes there a man with heart so heavy that in the summer has never said, 'This is my time at last to dive and swim or sink, and then walk home in bare feet, with a stick of hay in my teeth to help me think!'"

The thing I liked about the piece of writing was the grand arrangement of the first four words, Breathes there a man, which had the effect of making me feel, Now we're talking. And made me believe I could talk that way, too, and probably ought to, for the good of my own green soul.

In ordinary everyday speech I had never heard anybody say anything in any such poetic manner, but now I knew it could be done, and therefore it was no longer necessary to imagine I would have to speak English as I had heard others speak it: I could speak it as others had written it.

I could speak writing: Dreams there a dreamer a dream more impossible to talk about than my dream of you, Maxine of the second grade, two desks forward, one aisle to the left?

The answer: No.

My dream of Maxine was not only impossible to talk about, I couldn't even write about it, but on Valentine's Day in 1916 when I was eight I tried to draw a picture about it: a heart with an arrow in it under the carefully printed name Maxine.

Below the heart was a whole great while space for my name, the adorer of the dumpy, stumpy, lazy, lumpy, lightheaded, lisping angel who had come directly from the spheres to enchant and torment me, although she lives in a hovel on Santa Clara Avenue near O Street, the daughter of an Irish day laborer.

There was space for my name as well as my message, but when I moved pencil point, eye and nose, secret and soul, to where I might begin to engrave the first letter of my name. I was stopped cold in my tracks.

I couldn't write my name.

I couldn't print the first initial of my first name, even, because in that great miracle, that great love, that great dream of Maxine, I was simply nothing--a total stranger, an outsider, an immigrant who actually wanted to invade a dimension in which he would be a crude clown, a rude fellow, an astonisher of the order of law and love, who would have to be laughed at or politely told to go back.

Who was I to think that I could send my drawing of love and adoration and my name and message to the Miracle of the Ages, Maxine Herself? William? Saroyan? How ridiculous and unfortunate each name was. How wrong, how hopeless.

I could talk writing all right, but I couldn't talk love. It was too big for language, line, sign, mark, engraving, letter, whisper, word, song, dance, glance, or thought, even; although for a while I expected thought to do what nothing else could.

I believed my dumpy little darling would find arriving into her own mysterious thinking-and-feeling processes the thought of my love, and one day would suddenly turn, look at me, and be as enchanted about me as I was about her. She would get up from her desk, come to me, and I would get up and take her by the hand and walk out of the room with her, out of Emerson School, out of the Public School System of Fresno, California, and out of the whole rigmarole of trying to get people to find out about love by sending them to school.

Maxine and I knew love, we had it, straight from the holy source of it, so we didn't need to go to school anymore.

I thought my deep long thought of love, and I waited for it to arrive in Maxine, so we could recognize one another and get the hell out of there.

But after three full long January weeks of total failure, I began to suspect that the dream of love that had come unaccountably into my life couldn't be directed into hers.

I waited, and then I stopped waiting. That wedding just wasn't happening.

Was it possible that it would never happen--all her life, all my life, all of everybody's life?

Was it possible that it simply couldn't happen? Couldn't we ever know something as simple as that without words? Couldn't we know it at just the right time because it was true? Always had been and always would be?

Well, it looked as if we couldn't.

There seemed to be simply no communication between people excepting by means of words, spoken or written, and so on Valentine's Day I began to make a valentine for Maxine, only to discover that my love was so great, mysterious, everlasting, hopeless, crazy, true and one sided that I couldn't sign the valentine, not even with my initials, not even with the always-popular Guess Who?

And yet she was the only girl in the whole world for me, so what was a man to do about that?

Well, I would do something, most likely, something in writing, most likely, because if the substitute communication was language, then that would be the thing I would be concerned about the rest of my life. I would try to find out how to make the substitute communication that is in words as near as humanly possible to the real communication that is not in words.

I would find out how to send valentines to Maxine--and to everybody else.

As for that particular valentine on that particular Valentine's Day, I didn't send it. It was too inadequate a substitute for my love, and so I had to reject it entirely. (concluded on page 188)Valentine(continued from page 77) I received a few valentines from girls I didn't like. I passed along a few to a few others I didn't dislike as much as I disliked the girls who had sent me valentines, and I signed them Guess Who, or You Know Who, or Al Nidevar, because I knew Al Nidevar despised that particular girl, and if we couldn't have love, maybe we could have laughter.

The valentines that came to me I shoved into the pocket of my overalls because they weren't from Maxine, but every now and then the rest of that day, while I was selling papers, I brought them out and looked at them and put them back, and thought about them and about the girls who had drawn them and sent them, and then sure enough, little by little, a kind of rather meaningful thing happened: I no longer disliked the girls who had sent me the valentines, I rather liked them, in fact. They weren't Maxine. I really didn't know who they were, but I rather liked them just the same.

And I knew the valentines didn't mean that they liked me, they meant something else, maybe something like, "Well, here we are, stuck with ourselves, not in love with one another the way anybody knows love really is, but what do we care, it's still pretty wonderful to be who we are, anyhow."

And so I was glad that I had been sent three valentines, and that I had sent four.

Love doesn't have to be perfect. Even imperfect, it is still the best thing there is, for the simple reason that it is the most common and constant truth of all, the very thing that holds everything together, that permits everything to move along in time and be its wonderful or ordinary self. (A rose is its own self, for instance, but no more its own self than a cabbage is its own self, although it's only a cabbage.)

Breathes there a man with memory so feeble that on Valentine's Day his soul is not gladdened by sending to somebody a substitute message of his real love, or delighted by the arrival from somebody of the same substitute message?

The answer: If he's still breathing, he's still in love.

Say I'm a liar, say this valentine is a lie, I still say I love you. Guess Who?