“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”                   -- Mother Teresa

Dudes are notoriously lame when it comes to Valentine’s Day. Over the years, my actions and inactions have placed me among the ranks of Troglodites who ignore or defame the meaning of this celebration.

Partly that’s because I’m often too busy to bother with things I judge as trifling or hyper sentimental. Partly it’s because I -- like most people -- don’t know who Saint Valentine was. We contemporary cavemen require textbook histories and action movies in order to take something seriously. Therein lies a problem.

From Wikipedia (the first source for trendy Trogs):

“Of the Saint Valentine whose feast is on February 14, nothing is known except his name and that he was buried at the Via Flaminia north of Rome on February 14.”

Surely this man whose name is synonymous with love is worthy of investigation. Yet in the absence of a written record, all we have is a legend.

Valentine was a priest in Rome during the third century A.D. The Emperor at that time, Claudius II, surmised that single men made better warriors than those who were married. He thought dudes without wives and children were more adept at the skill set necessary for conquest -- raping, killing, pillaging, etc. So he outlawed marriage for young men in order to amass military might.

Valentine the priest chose to marry young couples secretly, and so was executed. He defied the Emperor’s order to “make war, not love.” Which made him a kind of Roman hippie, I suppose. No wonder the written record was removed. Whatever letters about love he composed would have been destroyed as radical threats to the party line.

I imagine those first valentines would not have made very good copy for Hallmark or Playboy. To defy the empire, Valentine must have felt love was something more than pricks from Cupid’s arrows.

If today’s dudes commemorate that fire from heaven, we might buy a heart-shaped box of chocolates we notice while picking up groceries on the way home from work. If we’re smart we’ll arrange a special date with our beloved, or bring home cute toys for our children.

Is this the best we can do to honor those flames that fuel the peace for our families? Can we also acknowledge their warmth in our fidelity to friends, colleagues, and co-workers?

If your first experience of Valentines Day is anything like mine, the connection is easy to overlook. I remember those little tokens of camaraderie I inscribed and put in the paper bags along the walls of the classroom. It was a big deal to spell the first names of others, not long after I had learned to spell my own.

The spirit in which those first valentines were given remind me of the spontaneous words that came out of my mouth recently while biding adieu to a good friend at Manzanita Fresh Foods.

“I love you Gary,” I affirmed in a voice that was loud enough to be laughed at by his co-workers and anyone else who thought me a wuss. Just popped out. It happens.

Brother Gary has been one of my favorite folks ever since I met first him at Osburn’s Grocery and Delicatessen in Cannon Beach. I’ve come to know him well enough to imagine that if he had been a priest in the third century, he would have married people. And on the way to his death, he might have told his executioners a few friendly jokes.

Valentines can also come from people we barely know. It happened one day while I was buying a newspaper at Manzanita Grocery & Deli. A woman behind the counter said: “We should probably ask you to sign the other ones. That was a good column you wrote.”

Jan didn’t know that at that moment I was in a funk that commonly haunts writers for small newspapers. We spend many hours trying to spell things out in hopes of serving the community. Depending on the response, we can wonder whether that work is of any real value.

Times aren’t anywhere near as hard as they were in the old days of empire. But they seem to be getting harder in spite of what we hear from the national news.

As man’s conquests continue to drain life and resources, small expressions of kindness can make a big difference. Words are like food.

Be radical. Spread the valentines. Do it in the name of love, and in honor of one brave dude.

-- First published as a column in the North Coast Citizen. Cross-posted at FireDogLake.com.