So let me tell you a little story about one special Valentine's Day years ago.
Being an English major, I was working in the high-stakes, sleek and sexy field of delivering pizzas for a college's cafe. One afternoon, I was delivering heart-shaped pizzas that parents had bought for their kids, but Valentine's fell on a holiday weekend that year. This meant that almost nobody was in their dorm room to get the pizzas, seeing as about the only people left on campus that weekend were the pizza deliverers and the library-wraiths.
At the end of the shift, we had plenty of extras, so I left with a couple huge pepperoni pizzas in the romantic shape of a frog's heart. Now, I wasn't dating anyone that February and most of my friends, not having to work on campus, were getting drunk on a beach somewhere or something, so I flopped myself down in the grass of a mall between two dorms to chew some pizza and feel bad about my life.
Some folks I vaguely knew walked by, saw me squatting there and asked, "Hey, is that good?" And I said something about it being bitter, bitter, and shaped like a heart. But some of them, it turned out, recognized I was misquoting a Stephen Crane poem rather than simply raving like a man who'd really enjoy life more with proper medications and round-the-clock care, and so they decided to join me and share some of these pizzas when I offered it to them.
It turned out to be a great Valentine's as more folks stopped by, and it turned into a gathering which lasted well into the night, based on nothing more than love of your fellow people and a little bit of sharing. And it came without ribbons! It came without tags! It came without packages, boxes or bags!
And we puzzled three hours, `till our puzzlers was sore. Then we all thought of something we hadn't before! "Maybe Valentine's," we thought, "doesn't come from a store. "Maybe Valentine's... perhaps... means a little bit more!"
Then, of course, our hearts all grew three sizes. I think, though, this had more to do with acid reflux from the grease and pepperoni than anything else.
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