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- Mary Krallmann


‘Be my valentine’

Let me count the words

The other day I checked a few lists of top-ranking valentine gifts and failed to fall in love with the choices in jewelry, the red stole made of cashmere and silk, or even the waffle iron with heart-shaped sections.

I don’t entirely espouse the anti-Valentine sentiment, however. I usually do send and receive cards for Feb. 14. Sometimes I wear red socks for the occasion. One year I got interested in heart-shaped cookie cutters with a recipe included. That project was especially memorable for how much longer it took to ice the cookies than to eat them.

For Valentine's Day another year, I went on a weekend trip to visit an aunt. We shopped at a craft store, where she bought a kit for a latch-hooked pillow top with a heart design. She did most of the work, and the finished pillow now makes its home on my loveseat, along with a huggable teddy bear and a companion stuffed animal that she also gave me.

This year I don't anticipate a gift or card from her. Even her letters have become infrequent and shorter than they used to be. Unexpectedly, though, and probably without realizing it, she again provided me with a treat for Valentine's Day.

From her new home in a setting with other elderly people, she reported that at one of their recent activity sessions they had made a list of words from the letters in "Be my valentine." She said they came up with 150. She didn't say how many people worked on it or how long, but I took it as a challenge. If they could find 150 words in that set of letters, I hoped that I could too.

Word searches like that happen to be one of my entertainment standbys for really slow times. That doesn't mean I don't like the game; I do. When my mind doesn't care to work on anything else, I can usually persuade it to hunt for words like at, an, it, in, and even amble or believe. Before long I have scrap papers scrawled full of word lists, and it looks as though something must be happening.

With frequently used letters and plenty of vowels, "Be my valentine" appeared to be an ideal source for lots of shorter words. It didn't take long to accumulate a list of 100 or so. Then, to speed up the finish, I used a fudge factor. Actually, I don't know if my aunt's group allowed proper nouns or not, but I usually don't. Bent was right there in the selected phrase, so I bent the rules and added names ranging from Amy and Annie to Eva, Lenny, Neal, Tim and Val. Soon I had enough words to keep up with my elders, and I was happy.

Surveying the list of results, I noted a few curiosities. For example, love is not part of "Be my valentine." With enemy, mean, vile, evil and alien instead, the prospects tended to be disheartening. My list could have been biased, but male and man lacked counterparts except for a gender-neutral mate and any of the specific names for women.

Traditional red didn't show up, but teal and tan made the list. Roses were nowhere to be seen, but ivy was there. The food choices included meal, meat, veal, lamb, beet, yam, lime (for puckering up?) and tea. No chocolate sweetened the list.

The activity itself was a calorie-free balance for another valentine wordplay that came to my attention. When I stopped for groceries, a heart-shaped sign hanging above an express checkout labeled it as "Lovers Lane" — for food lovers, I presume. Romance is suggested by the phrase, and love is included at least, but I really don’t think it’s a good prospect for finding another 149 words. "Be my valentine" was a better choice.

[Mary Krallmann]

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