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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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