Mine never was.

As far as I know, I only lost one tooth at school, and I’m not quite sure what happened to it. I can’t remember now if it came out, I put it in a pocket and dropped it, or if it came out on the playground and I didn’t notice that it had happened. I do remember, though, that I spent what felt like hours looking for it. I combed the playground methodically, walking slowly across the width of it, then turning at the end and walking back a few inches to the right. When my mother came to get me, I tried to convince her that I had to find my tooth before we could go home. She made me get in the car.

I was half-hysterical and sobbing. I’m sure I had plans for that tooth money. (I got a dollar. Eventually, it occurred to me that most of my friends got considerably less, and I began to question whether a real tooth fairy would pay differing ransoms for different children’s teeth.) We had some elk teeth, though, and a human tooth with a gold filling in it (which I believe had been my grandfather’s). “I’ll put one of these under the pillow!” I thought. “She’ll never know the difference!”

Mom didn’t think that was such a great idea.

Eventually, I settled for putting a note under my pillow, explaining the lost tooth.

In the morning, I got a dollar.

And I thought, “Hey, maybe I could just put a note like that under my pillow every night.”

Mom didn’t think that was a great idea, either.

Damn her, always being right.

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In elementary school, I longed for Valentine’s cards from the boys I crushed on. And, of course, I got them – the same flimsy cardboard hearts, adorned with bad puns and cartoon bears, that every other girl in class got. There were rules, you see. If you brought Valentines, you had to bring one for everyone – and they all had to be the same.

Things changed when I started dating. Now Valentine’s Day brought gifts that were just for me. I might still have some of them, somewhere. Flowers and candies and strange plastic toys. I don’t remember that I was ever single on Valentine’s Day, but I also don’t remember any specific Valentine’s Day. It’s all a blur of red and white, and it’s all faded into the mists of time.

I got married (the first time), and while we always said “Oh, we don’t really do Valentine’s Day,” we did. There was always a special meal, at a restaurant we didn’t often go to, and there was always Valentine’s sex, because Valentine’s Day means you have to be in the mood.

Looking back, I realize that Valentine’s Day meant something special then because, no matter how I denied it, something was missing from Every Day that had to be wedged into this one heart-soaked Day in mid-February. That’s no longer the case. I know it’s cliche to say that “Every day is Valentine’s Day,” but if that means that every day, you say “I love you,” and that every day, you do something to show it – then it’s no cliche.

And so tonight, because we have no need to indulge in a Greeting Card Holiday to prove our love for each, NovySan and I are home, drinking cocktails (Pegu for me, a Perfect Manhattan for him), and getting ready to spend some quality time on UStream with our friends Be The Boy and The Slackmistress.

It was the Slackmistress’s recent post on Pointless Banter, concerning Crap Women Don’t Want for Valentine’s Day, that provided the original impetus for my Valentine’s Post. When she described a Valentine’s Day card display as looking “like they split Cupid open and shook his red heart-shaped entrails all over the place,” I thought, “What if we celebrated Valentine’s Day really authentically, as the feast of a martyred saint?” Which led me to a meditation on the reason for the season, as they say.

According to the always-infallible Wikipedia, there are three saints commonly identified as the Saint Valentine after whom the holiday is named. Catholic Online, though, while acknowledging that there is some controversy over the number of St. Valentines, and their exact occupations, focuses on one – a Roman priest, who, according to the Nuremberg Chronicle, was stoned, beaten and finally beheaded for the crime of performing Christian marriages and attempting to convert Claudius II (also known as Claudius Gothicus, which leads me to a wonderful mental image of Derek Jacobi in heavy eyeliner and latex club wear).

So, if you aren’t spending time with your sweetheart tonight, or if you can’t come and join us for Be the Marriage LIVE! (On Ice), you might consider martyring someone. Or, in fact, massacring several someones, if that’s more your speed. Just don’t tell the cops I sent you.

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It started at my first California apartment, in San Leandro. I had a wireless phone I’d brought with me from Wyoming, and whatever frequency it was on, it seemed to pick up signals from someone else’s phone. My phone would ring – and sometimes it was an odd, strangled sort of ring – and when I picked it up, I’d hear a conversation already in progress. The first time, I made the mistake of trying to talk to the people on the other end. “Hello?” I said. There was a pause. Then a woman snapped, “This is a private conversation!” “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.” And I hung up.

The second also happened in San Leandro, and it had to do with my phone number. How can I put this delicately? It was… It was not a virgin number. It had, in fact, been with someone before me. I don’t remember her name, but she was an elderly woman, and another elderly woman kept trying to call for her. She’d become very agitated when I tried to explain that this was no longer her friend’s number. After several months of this, her son called. “My mother is very upset,” he told me. “She says this is her friend’s number.” “I know!” I told him. “I wish I knew her friend’s new number, or knew what had happened to her.” He thanked me, and said he’d try to explain it to his mom. I didn’t hear anything else about the old lady whose number I had until about a year later, when I got a call from her church. All this time, I’d been assuming she must have died, and her family hadn’t told her friend – but don’t you think her church should have known if she was dead? And isn’t it a bit odd that they’d waited so long to find out why she wasn’t coming to church? There’s an older woman in my church who complains that if she misses a single service, ten people call to find out if she’s okay, but this poor lady had been MIA for over a year. I still wonder where she went.

The third involves my cell phone number, which apparently once belonged to a television producer whose wife’s name is Promise. This led to a surreal conversation that went something like this. *ring ring* “Hello?” “Promise?” “What?” “Hello?” “Yes?” “Promise?” “Promise hello?” “What?” “Promise what?” “Is this Promise?” I did eventually figure out whose number I had, and I’ve looked up his new number, but I haven’t given it out – though a number of the people who’ve called have asked me to. And I find that odd. Have you ever dialed a wrong number and asked the person who answered what number you should have called? Is the phone company in the habit of telling you, “We’re giving you Steve’s old number, so if someone calls for Steve, tell them his new number’s 555-234-6969″? My favorites, though, were the ones who got angry about it. “Well, how do you know this used to be his number?” As though I’d stolen it from him. “Because I get a lot of calls for him,” I’d say, and this confused them so I could escape.

And the fourth happened just yesterday. I went to get a glass of water, and when I came back, I had a missed call from a number I didn’t recognize. Several hours later, the phone rang again, and I answered it. “This is Chia,” I said. There was a pause, and an old lady said, “Hello?” “Yes,” I said, “who were you calling for?” I half wondered if another old woman might be haunting my phone line. “Who is this?” she asked. “Chia,” I said. “Jill?” “No, Chia. Who were you calling for?” “My phone rang,” she said, accusingly. “But I don’t know who you are.” “You called me,” I said. “I didn’t call anyone!” she said. “Okay,” I said. “Goodbye.”

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I worked at a book/video/hobby store in my home town (which was sadly driven under when a mega-chain came to town – though that might not have happened had the woman who owned it not been quite such a dragon) that had an excellent selection of porn mags (this is where I first saw both “Barely Legal” and “Perfect Ten”), an oddly dated selection of porn flicks (I think the owner stopped buying them around 1985), and, at one time, a very broad selection of porn novels (they were gone by the time I worked there, but one of my friend’s mothers had a trunkful of them).

Anyway, it was a small town, and occasionally, something would happen that would make the owners twitchy about the porn selection. (Actually, the old lady never mentioned the porn. The old man was in charge of the porn. They were both Mormon. I’m not sure if that’s relevant here.) Years before I worked there, for instance, someone smashed the front window and stole all the porn mags as a protest against pornography. (Seriously!) The police recovered them, but of course they had to hold them as “evidence,” and they never made their way back to the store. During the subsequent media flap (as much as you can flap a single newspaper that rarely ran more than 30 pages, including the Classifieds), everything but “Penthouse” and “Playboy” came off the shelf.

The old man told me this story while he was clearing the shelves again. This time, a major local kerfuffle had erupted over a local bar’s decision to bring some (*gasp*) strippers up from Denver. (Yes, we had to import strippers.) Some stick-ass who’d walked past the bar during the show claimed he’d seen them grinding their naked naughty bits and insisted that something had to be done. (Never mind that the windows of this particular bar were covered in blackout paper even when there weren’t any strippers inside. Either he was lying about seeing them, or he was lying about seeing them from outside.) The city council heeded the call of their outraged constituency, and drafted an anti-obscenity statute which was justly ridiculed for outlawing not only those filthy out-of-state strippers, but also artistic nudes, theatrical nudity (I’m sure the university’s theatre department was thumbing its nose at them when they mounted “Equus” a few years later) and teenaged boys’ boners. (It quite specifically stated that no man could appear in public, clothed or unclothed, in a “discernibly turgid” state. Of course someone immediately printed up t-shirts that said “Discernibly Turgid.” The bear at the Fireside wore one for years.)

The measure was eventually defeated, but meanwhile, the old man took most of the more “interesting” magazines off the shelves and moved the entire stock of porn flicks to the back room. A few customers asked where they’d gone, and we’d explain they were just hiding out until the city council decided whether nudity was to be allowed in the Gem City of the Plains. Most of our customers, though, were far too shy to even mention their absence. Not Our Very Best Porn Customer, though. Our Very Best Porn Customer came in almost every day to get his fix. Tuesdays and Wednesdays were two-for-one (and oh, how I did love tormenting those blushing college boys who could barely bring themselves to rent a porno from a girl, by telling them they could get another for the same price), and so every Tuesday and Wednesday, without fail, he’d rent two and sometimes four porn tapes. Now, as I’ve said, the owner hadn’t bought anything new in quite some time – and you mustn’t think he’d bought a lot when he was still buying. I don’t think we had more than 100 pornos in the whole store. One of my coworkers figured it up once and realized that Our Very Best Porn Customer had seen every porn tape we had at least four times, and he’d seen his favorites much more often. During the great porn drought, he still came in almost every day, asking if the porn was back, and consoling himself with R-rated movies that might at least give him a bit of boob.

After a few months of this, the old man finally made his decision. All of the magazines went back on the shelf, but the porn tapes – the porn tapes had to go. Our Very Best Porn Customer was first in line. He nearly staggered under the weight of his purchases. Star 85. The Italian Stallion. (So well-loved that its original cover was long gone – it lived in a plain plastic box with a xeroxed picture of Sly Stallone stuck to the front.) All of his favorites, many of his stand-bys, and a few he said he’d never even watched. (So much for my colleague’s math skills.)

And that is my two-for-one porn story. What’s yours?

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From the time I was maybe 12 or 13, all the way through high school, I made some extra money in the summers shooting gophers in the horse pasture. Mom would pay me $1 a head for killing the squeaky little menaces, and never asked to see the corpses. One lovely, sunny morning, I was out in the eastern half of the pasture, near the road, when I spotted a gopher to the west of me. I fired. My aim was a bit low, and the bullet skipped off the hard-packed ground and ricocheted through the double pane of plate glass in the bow-fronted window of the house.

I didn’t realize it had happened until I came in and my father offered me the bullet. It was only a .22, so it hadn’t gotten far after punching through both panes of glass. He’d found it on the window seat. “Lucky for you that didn’t keep going and hit your mother’s china cabinet,” he said. “And that you hit the house, instead of one of your mother’s yearling foals.”

“Dad,” I said. “I would never aim toward the horses.”

Guess I shouldn’t have aimed toward the house, either…

I still have that bullet somewhere. Someday, I’m going to make a navel jewel out of it, like the dancer in The Man with the Golden Gun.

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