Love conveyed in intimate language, language you don't often hear, rarely in a lifetime, soft and low toned. It is together-language, sometimes between a couple, sometimes among a few.

I got my idea about this from the children's book called The Tomten. What language was the Tomten speaking, and why couldn't we understand him? The Tomten was creeping around at night looking at people sleeping. He walked in the farmyard silently in the muffled snow, always alone.

My mother read a lot of Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka books to us, myself and my siblings, when we were children, and also Snip, Snap, and Snur. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree, as the saying goes.

Despite the prowling aspect, the Tomten is about love, and just as often, about sorrow and understanding. It is often about all three.

If you hear the Tomten at all, it will be barely audible, so soft and low. The sound becomes something that soothes rather than elucidates. Yet, it is understood. It is an intimacy that the oppressed share with each other under the shadow of their oppressor. It is salve, soothing wounds. Is the Tomten among the oppressed?

The secret is spoken between lovers after years together and many battles. The words are, more often than not, mundane. If you listened carefully to each word, you would not find out a single secret.

Old husbands sit next to their wives and talk about the coming rain or a crop or something that needs fixing, resting their elbows on the table, maybe, or looking into their coffee cups. Small talk meaning nothing and everything.

This kind of talk is understanding of sorrow, disappointment, trouble, love, passion, and death.

It is a gift of comfort to another soul.

Valentine's Day is for kids. In my grade school everyone got valentines, because that's just the way things happened. The teacher made sure valentine distributions were fair and democratic. Democracy and love combined, what a concept.

Now, as then, the teacher gives everyone a valentine and maybe puts a valentine sugar cookie with pink icing and red lettering on a paper doily and gives everyone a red construction-paper mailbox. Every kid gets at least one valentine.

Future bean counters count all their loot, and the germinating statisticians try to concoct a mental flow chart of how it all translates into their popularity score or some other value system now, as then.

Cookies and punch and candy hearts and cake are gobbled along with paste and glue and unknown grunge from desks at school parties. A good time is had by all, now as then.

The teacher modeled a behavior called kindness, a lesson not lost. All the kids understood. They did not cogitate or analyze. They intuited. In each little beating heart an idea of what love is sprouted. I had some really good teachers then, as now.

You remember your valentine mailbox. It had white paper paste holding the whole thing together. You fashioned it during art class with frightful concentration, your fat pencil clutched in your chubby fist, sweat dripping from your brow. It was all low brow back then.

The valentines were theoretically all alike, but in truth, each one was slightly different because of the paste and blunted scissors and general artistic bent of each budding artist, each with their own personal scrawled signature.

Now and then, if a special someone in class liked you a bit more than normal, he or she would approach you with a simple hot and heavy grin, because grins are all you can have in the fourth grade. He or she would ask you if you liked the valentine card he or she gave to you, eyes wide with hope.

You would know which one it was when they asked, because they would have signed their card in especially big letters and maybe added extra text like Do you like me? I like you. They may have Elmer's-glued some of those tiny valentine candy hearts that say things like O U Kid or On Fire 4 U somewhere on the card or maybe I Luv U or, worse yet, Kiss Me. They would look deeply into your eyes, expectantly. Sometimes you were thrilled, sometimes rejecting, and sometimes scared.

The best part was that your "valentine" really meant it. He or she was not trying to trick you to get access to your credit cards and bank accounts. They were not pulling the wool over your eyes so they could kiss and tell, extra extra read all about it. This was no butter-up, no racking-up points, no "Carrie at the prom".

Their gushing stubby little selves just felt they loved you to death and hoped you felt the same way too, extra extra read all about it.

Jobs, I've had a few.

Once I had a job in a little How Town. In this town were men the likes of which I have not seen since. Usually, I would see them in pairs, together but not really. Casually draped over the tables of outdoor cafes. Or just walking down the street. Or bumping into one another at the bookstore or library.

I had to work in the basement for security purposes, a very cushy basement, but the fringe benefits more than compensated and exceeded the pay.

They had the same name, so I called them Left and Right, and they understood everything I said to them. What a relief. They seemed to be un-warlike towards me, maybe even kindly disposed. They would chat lightly about current events and audio-visual equipment. Rain in my eyes later because of that.

The Right man wore thick, expensive white cotton shirts imported from Egypt and monogrammed. He never ironed them, not even when he went to expensive places. I imagined that he had a bed with sheets made of the same material with an antique headboard. I think he was a doctor, but he never said. Working, we liked to practice a secret form of martial arts that involved only the imagination. I was skilled at blocking, he at finding vulnerable places in the mental armor. The secret was in not destroying anything or anyone.

I ran into Lefty in the snow one night. It was muffled outside because of it, and sound was not even an issue. He said he was cold as a million snow stars fell on his eyelashes. I said he should probably go home then.

A few seconds passed. We said goodnight and goodbye.

I do not know if they were ever real.