Why Valentine's Day Passed Without Comment and How the Universe Got Even

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered. - Tom Stoppard

And it still might have passed without a word from me, except that two things happened willy-nilly that made me shed a little residual love-bitterness.

The first one was a Facebook request. Please keep in mind that I only joined Facebook a few years ago to make class groups for all my students. I quickly found that while they never check their email, they live and die by Facebook. It's a teaching strategy and it works. Since then, Generation Jones - the check-writing parents of all these students - invaded Facebook and hijacked collegiate sovereignty from their kids. Suddenly, all of these people I haven't thought about since high school started popping up and asking me to "be their friend." I'm not comfortable with mixing my professional and private life on Facebook, so I'm a pretty lousy "friend." My students don't need to read any "remember the time we..." on my wall, for instance.

But back to the request. I logged on the other day and there is a request from John, the first boy I ever kissed and meant it. Seventh grade. Behind the lockers. I don't need to recreate this moment for you because we all have this flutter-heart moment at least once. It's pure and young and lives forever in an unsullied place no matter how cynical we become. John and I were beautiful and then he moved away. All that sneaky practice-kissing and playing at love without the pain of junior high infidelity or break-up dramatics. He simply moved away and left all this delicious longing. Most of the boys after that weren't so kind. Neither was I.

I checked his profile and John is everything he should be, I guess. Married, father of four, a Republican. He's an insurance adjuster and his favorite book is the Bible. A textbook-perfect Southern treasure of a man. Not for me, necessarily, but for the type of woman who is now Mrs. John.

The second thing actually happened over a month ago, but I filed it away quickly because it was too much to think about at the time. John and Facebook made me think about it finally and for good.

At UCA, we have a composition celebration of first-year writing students called AfterWords. It's an opportunity for freshman comp students to share their writing with each other and compete for cash money prizes. The whole process wraps up with a day or two of public readings and is quite a good idea.

One afternoon during the celebration while students were taking turns reading their crafted narratives behind a podium, a sweet young thing stepped up and broke all our hearts by reading a very personal and gut-wrenching account of her reckless, wayward father and the day he died. The poor child had a difficult time getting through the reading and I didn't blame her one bit. It was clear, however, that her pain and anger required voicing. I wept with her as she bravely read.

At one point in the narrative she and her sister stand in front of his headstone, and she reads her dead father's name as if to conjure or damn him or both. Jay _______.

And I froze.

What are the odds that a sweet boyfriend I loved 33 years ago would later marry, have a daughter who by chance attends the very college where I teach, who then writes a story for a competition, and reads it in the very room where I sit as audience when she finally reads the anger he's given her? My sweet boyfriend when I was fourteen became an addict and a no-show father. He died from the failures he became and that I never saw coming. Jay was 49.

You can understand why I filed it away. I'm still unsure how to process that kind of coincidence.

The boys I loved are men now and some are dead. They are special because I can freeze-frame them individually at the age they were when I loved them, before they became the men I couldn't really love or the ones who would tear my heart out. These boys belong to me and I can replay each of them at their best, at my best, the 8mm camera in my head selecting only the loveliest parts of us.

So today I'm giving my inner love-cynic a rest. I'm putting down all the baggage and recursive disappointment and I'm going to put my feet up, thread the projector, and allow the prettier times to cast their smiling shadows on the wall.

Happy Valentine's Day, boys. I won't forget again.

Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition

There are so many things I love about Arkansas. To the north we have the idyllic geography of the Ozarks, hills rolling and tree-covered, the land covered with fossils from an ancient sea-time. The south is a red-clay pine forest where, if you look very carefully, you can find diamonds. The people here are proud, stubborn, fascinating survivors of the economic turn from rural farming to whatever it is we are now becoming. Sure, there are metropolitan areas. Little Rock is a fine example and just big enough to trip over itself while it morphs into a large city.

I love it here and find it hard to imagine living anywhere else.

That doesn't mean I don't have times when I shake my head in bewilderment. Yesterday the Arkansas House of Representative voted to allow concealed weapons in churches. Seriously. They did.

The argument is that smaller congregations can't afford expensive security forces, so it's every man for himself in the pews now. Legally.

The kind of change Arkansas is going through now is tough for most to stomach. I understand that. I even expected a little paranoia, which we exhibited full-tilt during the last election. But I think we've crossed the line when we begin legislating concealed weapons in houses of God. I can't imagine sitting there on a Sunday morning and wondering if the deacons are packing.

Not that I actually sit there on a Sunday morning, but, you know, if I did it would be most disconcerting.

So what's next? I'm almost afraid to find out.

Potty Training Little Boys: A View From the Cheap Seats

The Perfect Grandson won't keep his pants on. This is a male phenomenon I've got little to no experience with, although everyone tells me it's What Boys Do. Interesting.

I raised a daughter. My parents raised two girls, and most of my experience with small children is braiding hair and sitting with books and picking flowers and hugging stuffed animals and incessant talking. Little boys are different. The Perfect Grandson is a running, jumping dervish. Every waking moment he's on the prowl, fixing things with plastic tools and throwing them with deadly-accurate aim. These are boy-things I expected, and it's a great fun to watch him scamper everywhere to do everything Right Now.

It's the naked-from-the-waist-down business that's a challenge, though. A few minutes of quiet at naptime usually means a semi-naked boy peeing between the crib slats and onto the floor. He likes to point, then, at his little parts and growl "Heeeaaah!" proudly. I'm not allowed to laugh.

And that's if we're lucky. A tossed diaper full of poop is, well, exactly what it sounds like. Yikes.

So even though he's only a year-and-a-half old, my daughter has begun potty training The Perfect Grandson. She bought a lot of books, scanned the internet, then introduced him to a convincing plastic potty that he immediately took apart and reassembled half a dozen times. So far his gnat-like attention span allows him to sit on it for two, maybe three seconds before running across the room and grabbing a soccer ball instead. Again, no laughing.

I'm not much help. My potty-training expertise is nil. A million years ago I bought the potty, my daughter sat on it, we read books and sang potty songs until - voila - the child was trained. I don't think it took a week. There was a Sitting Still component to that experience that doesn't look promising this go-round.

There's also the lack of a Visual Aid in this manless house, if you don't count the dog. Boner (don't ask) our little black daschund is also a boy, but he's constantly lifting his leg on bushes in the yard. He's no help at all and has other bad habits that make him more of a cautionary tale than an example.

The word out there is that boys take a long time to potty train. Sometimes forever, they say. A friend of mine raised boys and tells me with a straight face there's a trick with floating Cheerios and aiming and such. What? In the meantime we're keeping an eye out for his lightning-fast Pants Off maneuver, my daughter is giving me stern looks, and I'm not supposed to laugh.

"Heeeaaah!"