Valentine's Day Memories.

No, not the one where my first girlfriend broke up with me over the phone on V-Day, also our one year anniversary, and took long enough to get around to it that I had taken the phone into the bathroom with me. She dumped me, over the phone, on the toilet, on our first anniversary, on Valentines Day, for vague reasons, which turned out to be that she was messing around with a fellow soon-to-be-valedictorian from three or four towns over.

Whatever, she listened to Rush Limbaugh every night. I'm not ungrateful, in hindsight, that she took the reins and yanked me out of a relationship that, on my side, was mainly about: 1) certain secondary sexual characteristics to which I was granted access for the first time in my life, and 2) the fact that she was female, much like the girl I had been hopelessly in love with for five years. It was not a good match. She wanted a right wing valedictorian, I wanted the friend who had sat across from me at lunch every day since seventh grade, who was funnier than me but still laughed at all my jokes.

But, clearly, this post is not about that. No, this isn't even about Valentines Day. In fact, it's not even a memory. I mean, I don't remember anything after the first scene.

It's about chocolate.

When I was probably 6 or 7 years old, and my brother 9 or 10, we were left alone for an afternoon. We wanted candy, but all we had around were Cheerios and Bisquick. Ooooooh, what's this up in the cupboard? Baker's chocolate? Let's just try it, whoa! bitter. Yeah, but if we put a bunch of these in a pan, pour a lot of sugar in, and melt them down, we could pour them into these little cupcake papers and once they cool...sweet!

We each had, I don't know, maybe four or five.

My mom came home from work and, according to her report, we had an alarming green pallor. She said that Dave was only seeing things in black & white. Neither of us could stand, or really even lie prone all that effectively. We were in separate rooms, each of us in our own hallucinatory state, according to the way our individual chemistry was reconciling the ill-advised infusion of the equivalent of four layer cakes into our body.

Happy Valentines Day!