Candy Hearts
We have a bowl of candy hearts sitting in our kitchen at work. Since there are so few of us on this floor, and no real non-chocolate candy eaters, I predict that these hearts will be sitting there for a long, long time so that they eventually congeal into one sugary, love-lorn mess.

And since it's been a week since Valentine's day, now is the time to launch into one of my favorite all time stories that does not involve a three hundred pound tumor. My friends, you have all been coerced into listening to me attempt to hack my way through this story probably numerous times, and here I go again. This time, though, you have the ability to skip it. Usually, I can't make it through a telling of this without laughing and ruining its effect, but now I have the advantage of just typing it.

Here goes:

My freshman year in high school, I had one girl in my dorm named Beth, who was a very nice girl from Florida. She was kind, all rounded edges, and pretty much as gentle as you can get. Anyway, back in 1991, it was Valentine's Day time and I had gone with Beth to check our mail in the student mailbox area (remember, it's boarding school). Anyway, Beth pulled a large red card out of her mailbox, slit it open, glanced at it, and immediately shoved it between her books. The rash treatment of what must have been a Valentine's Day card sparked my interest, and I inquired about it. Perhaps there was a 14 year old back home in Florida that none of us knew about? Beth pooh-poohed it, and tried to direct my attention to something else--should we get sherbet from upstairs?--but my nose for gossip had been whetted and I was like a hunting dog to the duck.

Finally, after much nagging, Beth sighed and relented. Holding the card just out of reach, she explained that her Russian grandfather couldn't read English, but he insisted on sending his grandkids cards for every holiday. He got pleasure of sorting through the card racks in the local drugstore and picking a card that looked just right.

She gave me the envelope, I snatched the card out, to see two smiling hearts on the cover. Pretty innocuous, right? But inside the card (and this is where I lose it in my verbal delivery) it read:

Violets are blue
Roses are thorny
When I think of you
It makes me horny.

Blah! The poor misguided grandfather, who just wanted to give his beloved granddaughter a sweet card of Valentine's Day.

After further questioning, though, it turned out that her grandfather had a running theme of sending wildly inappropriate cards. Apparently, he liked to send Beth's older 17-year old brother beefcake cards. The one for his birthday featured a lone shirtless man on the cover, and inside it only read: "Thinking of you." Now, I know that the guy couldn't read English, but how did he think a shirtless man would be appropriate on a card for his teenage grandson? Maybe he thought the guy was a superhero type or something.