Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and all I’ve heard all week is about how I’m going to get so much chocolate, like this much, and how I shouldn’t eat it all at once, and how I should be careful because I’ll be expected to give candy in return on White Day. Well, let me be the first to say that I couldn’t care less. I’m ready for handouts. I feel pretty confident it’s coming, too, since as I write this three girls (not in my class) are standing in front of my desk and giggling like the schoolgirls they are every time I glance upwards. In my book, this spells candy.
For me, Valentine’s Day is generally a pretty apathetic affair punctuated perhaps by the occasional Lifetime special on wife-beating or an anti-romantic meal with other frequently-single people. The last one I remember sticks out vividly in my mind:
There we are, listening to Foreigner on a Waffle House jukebox, when I notice that the guy at the counter next to me is staring at the waitress ringing up checks. Not checking her out, not vacantly gazing. Staring. Needless to say, this captures my imagination, and I’m on the edge of my seat 20 minutes later, when he finally speaks to her. The conversation happens like this:
“You got any kids?”
She didn’t even bother to make eye contact, clicking away at her register, but answered, “Two of ‘em,” in a low Southern drawl.
Silence followed for another few minutes, and he asked, “You gotta man around?” Getting to the point, I would go on to learn, is sometimes appreciated.
“Yeah.”
“You wanna come over sometime?”
Surely, I thought, this man was not serious. He did, after all, ask the prerequisite question about whether or not she was in a relationship, implying that the answer mattered to him in some way. Learning she was attached, he continued right along with his proposition as if this was no concern to either of them, which it apparently, mind-blowingly, was not.
“Sure. I don’t want no wife catching us and trying to come after me, though.”
At the time, I thought: Flawless. This is better than television. This is better than any bar conversation I’ve ever heard or any quiet exchange over coffee. This is better than most books. How many people get to see this kind of exchange up close? It’s like watching humpback whales mate, a sight a handful of people on the Earth have been lucky enough to witness. In six sentences, they had managed to decide that, yes, they would be sleeping together. That’s the magic of Valentine’s day.
Well, I don’t need all of that, but empty calories would be nice. I want to snack on rice balls tomorrow about as much as I want to see the world’s paraplegics challenge the world’s morbidly obese to a naked make-out contest, which just isn’t very much at all.