As You Like It: To My Shy Valentine

This column was originally published in the Canton Citizen in 1999.

I’ve been told many things: that fairy tales happen, that princes do appear despite frogs, and that I wear my heart upon my sleeve. I can’t help it; I tend to embrace the world with open arms.

Joni and Steve Schottenfeld on New Year’s Eve in 1970

Thirty-two years ago a painfully shy boy in my English class set his sights on my heart, took a deep breath, and smiled at me. I smiled back. He asked me out to a Broadway play, and I, suitably impressed, agreed. I tore through my closet looking for the perfect outfit and settled for a gray dress and a pink scarf. I still have the scarf.

I remember when he picked me up he looked so strange in his suit and tie. I was used to seeing him in jeans and sneakers. We were very formal.

The play must have been wonderful I’m sure, but I was too distracted by his arm on the seat next to mine and the fact that I was so hungry my stomach was rumbling. I turned every shade of red certain that he could hear every mortifying sound.

When we finally went to dinner, I nibbled my French fries and laughed at his jokes. On the way home he took my elbow when we crossed the street and I jumped at the unexpected touch. We said a very stiff goodbye at my front door and it was then that I suddenly decided to kiss him good night. He told me later that he never remembered how he got home that night.

All through high school we skated under chilly Brooklyn stars, kissed on empty beaches, rowed lazy circles on the lake in Central Park, and wed our futures going round a Coney Island Ferris wheel. And then, I left. It wasn’t planned, it was where my heart led me — to another love, another country, a different life.

For four years I followed foreign routines, felt a strange language on my tongue and saw my future meander lazily out before me. Until it crashed. Until once again my heart was on my sleeve, but this time, shattered, each piece aching for a voice that I would never hear again.

And then, that same shy Brooklyn man found my heart once more, and slowly, with soft, careful words began to gather it together and handed it back to me merged with his.

So we packed our sleeping bags and spent the summer finding Kansas prairies and Colorado mountains and Montana sunrises and ourselves. And we finally found us on a swing in an empty, razor straight, Indiana campground.

I’ve been told that the whisper of a butterfly’s wings can cause a landslide on the other side of the world and a groundhog can see spring in his shadow and that there is gold at the end of the rainbow if only you know where to look. And I believe it. I’ve learned that fairy tales do exist if you wear your heart on your sleeve and wait for the brush of a butterfly’s wing.

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Posted by Joan Florek Schottenfeld on Feb 12 2021. Filed under As You Like It, Featured Content, Opinion. Both comments and pings are currently closed.