Sharing the Love in Downtown Missoula
(Source: Flickr.)
Valentine’s Day has always been a little bit like New Year’s Eve for me; a second-string holiday. It all started with childhood, running down a list of classmates’ names, fretting over who would get which card from the box of valentines. What does Be Mine really mean? Will giraffes with necks entwined give the wrong message? Did I accidentally just put a conversation heart that said Hot Stuff in Bobby R.’s Valentine? It seems a lot of stress and anxiety for nothing more than a handful of Hershey’s kisses, sad bouquets of pink carnations, and those candy hearts that taste like minty chalk. Wake me up when it’s over.
But in early 2015, my experience of Valentine’s Day was forever changed when I went to purchase a chair I found on Craigslist in Missoula.
I had found the chair, upholstered in starfish print fabric, while mindlessly scrolling through Craigslist late one night. My husband Chris voted no, reminding me of the square footage of the tiny apartment we lived in at the time, but I simply couldn’t live without it. After contacting the seller and arranging to buy the chair, I begged Chris to go pick it up for me, pleading a case of social anxiety. He objected, pointing out, “You’re the only one who really wants the chair, Karla.” Touché.
Before I even knocked on the door, the starfish chair owner’s cheerful voice called out, “Come on in!” Inside, the brightly lit living room was a kaleidoscope, a glittery explosion of industry, creativity, and magic. There were chairs in every stage of reupholstering, TV trays covered with handmade earrings, a table heaped with paints, glue guns, sequins, buttons, and woodworking tools. A pile of plastic horses had been sawed in half, the hindquarters turned into magnets that made it look like a horse had walked headfirst into your refrigerator door.
I was spellbound.
Our connection came easily, and so did the laughter. Within minutes, Tina revealed she was a dental hygienist, which, of course, made me want to switch dentists so she could clean my teeth. It was abundantly clear how creative and artistic she was. After I told her I was a nurse, I added that I was also a writer.
“You’re a writer?” she asked excitedly.
She told me she was inspired by a street poet she’d once seen typing up verse on the street in New Orleans. She said she always wanted to take typewriters to the street on Valentine’s Day, typing extemporaneous poems for passers by.
“I need a writer to help me make it happen!”
“Oh, I write…but I’m definitely no poet,” I objected.
“It’s just for fun,” she assured, “I just want to make people smile and feel loved on a day that can be so stupid.”
A few nights before Valentine’s Day, we met up in Tina’s craft lair to prepare; cutting hearts from construction paper, card stock, magazines, and old wallpaper, embellishing them with everything from sequins to pompoms to hot pink faux fur, made possible by the hot glue gun.
The morning of the event, we used colored chalk to draw arrows and hearts leading to our card tables on a busy Missoula street corner. We pinned construction paper hearts and letters that spelled out “Free Valentines” to a portable projector screen we placed behind our tables. We set up our typewriters, displayed the homemade cards, and then we waited.
The original event in 2015. I’m on the left, Tina sits on the right. (Source: Author.)
Encouraging people to stop for a free Valentine poem made me feel like a door-to-door salesperson or a carny hawker. Most people would hold up their hand, lower their eyes and say, “I’m good,” as though they were stuffed to the gills with Valentine’s poetry and couldn’t bear a single word more. Occasionally, someone would slow down and exclaim what wonderful thing we were doing, then nervously scurry on. Some stared straight ahead, or down at their phones, speeding up as they passed, and a handful of folks even reacted like we were asking them to join a religious cult.
People aren’t sure how to react when you offer them something with no strings attached. Telling them there are no strings attached somehow makes them even more suspicious. To be honest, I can’t blame people. We humans are easily blindsided by random acts of kindness. Also, I should add, Tina and I were dressed to the nines in vintage outfits and had taken on the personas of cheeky 1950’s secretaries, which may have been off-putting to an unsuspecting pedestrian on the way to the bank.
We sat shivering behind our typewriters, typing away on scratch paper just to move our cold fingers and to make noise that might entice passers by to stop. We were just about to give in to disappointment when our first taker showed up: A young woman who stood with her eyes closed and recited song lyrics while I typed them onto a pink construction paper heart. Each keystroke was exhilarating. At the end of her recitation, she dedicated the words to herself, pressing the paper heart to her chest. It was an auspicious beginning.
Within minutes, people started stopping, browsing, asking questions. Some hung back nervous, reluctant, but then stepped up and went for it. Soon the typewriter keys were striking away in a flurry, Tina on her 1937 Remington, me on my 1960s Smith-Corona Skywriter. We typed up poems on the fly, silly rhymes, knock-knock jokes, and even a Valentine containing a marriage proposal for one guy who planned on popping the question later that day. We made countless cards for people’s friends, co-workers, electricians, teachers, dog groomers, grandparents, ex-husbands, neighbors, bus drivers, and random strangers.
One man who had us write a poem for his cat returned later in the day with a big box of candy from a local chocolate shop. “It’s contagious, he said with a beatific smile, proffering the open box to anyone who walked by. A woman and her daughter brought a basket of hand-knit hats to place on our table with a sign that said FREE. Someone else brought a pizza to share.
It was getting dark, and even colder, but we were almost manic with the desire to keep giving. After we packed up our supplies and loaded them into Tina’s car, we tucked Valentines under windshield wipers of parked cars, under door mats, hung them from tree branches, and rubber banded them to people’s bicycle handlebars.
Tina hanging up Valentines in downtown Missoula, Montana. (Source: Author.)
Tina and I have carried on this tradition. Each time, it unfolds into its own unique event. In 2018, my sister Christa joined us, and I remember the three of us running around downtown in wigs and heart-shaped sunglasses, storming into H & R Block just before closing time to present unsuspecting tax preparers with Valentine’s cards and poems.
Needless to say, I was crushed in 2019 when Tina announced her move to Juneau, Alaska. It signaled the end of an era.
I had just begun to slip back into Valentine’s Day malaise when the call came, just a few weeks ago. “Any interest in doing Valentine’s Day, Alaska-style?” Tina wanted to know. She’d secured a venue for us to do our typewriter poetry: the Juneau Wearable Arts Festival. She would purchase a plane ticket for me with her frequent flier miles, if I said the word.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Chris urged me to go anyhow, reminding me of the funny way things work out sometimes. “For instance, remember you had wanted me to go pick up the starfish chair?”
I said the word, and in all caps: YES. Minutes later, the flight confirmation was delivered to my email inbox.
This is to say that the next time we meet, dear reader, I’ll be writing to you from our 49th state. Stay tuned next week, when I’ll recap highlights from the Alaska edition of the Valentine’s Day typewriter poetry fest.
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Sara Joy Proppe is the founder and director of Proximity Project, a consultancy that helps churches discover how they can use placemaking to connect with the local community.