If a cow ever got the chance...

Valentine's Day is very difficult for me.

I went to college in a run-down Midwestern small town, which had exactly two blocks of spiffed-up, "quaint" old-fashioned storefronts. The one business that really had been there for eighty years was this little candy store in the middle of the block. They had ever-changing window displays for Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, etc. Anyway, one V-Day someone had the idea to fill the entire window display with conversation hearts--like a foot deep. It was cute. Of course, on February 15th they suddenly had pounds and pounds of unusable candy hearts. SO, the owners scraped them out of the windowsill and wrapped them, an ounce at a time, in leftover plastic wrap that quickly became covered with a dull film of powdered sugar. Of course, the hearts were all bleached by that time, from being in the sunny window, and you could barely tell one color from another.

Guess who bought them? Every time I went there to buy cigarettes? (And I was a pack-a-day smoker, so that meant at least once a day...)

I'm aware that I'm very sick. I mean, why, of all the weird candy out there, do I have an obsession with conversation hearts? I know they taste like artificially sweetened chalk. I know I might as well just mix some cornstarch with sugar water and drink it. But for some reason none of this matters. I even like the little sayings and how they tried to update for the 1990s, so now some of the hearts say "PAGE ME" and "COOL".

The hearts from the window display lasted until late April. But as far as I know, I was the only one buying them.

So the reason I was thinking about all of this today is that after work I was in Osco, in the grip of a major sugar crave, and nothing would do except sugarchalk. So I was lurking in the Valentine's aisle in my usual furtive and vaguely shoplifterish way, trying to talk myself out of it, when I happened to glance at the ingredients listing on the back of the bag.

Candy hearts contain gelatin. Can you believe this? It's the seventh ingredient, just before "artificial flavors". They're made from hooves! (Just like my other erstwhile favorite, circus peanuts.) The only good thing about this discovery is that it killed any desire I had to buy them. I didn't even want sugar anymore.

Now there is really nothing left for me to confess here on dLand. Um, let's never speak of this again.

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