Valentine Exchanges & Forebodings

Johnny Kendy needed a big coffee can, without the coffee, with a slot cut in the lid, so his classmates could drop Valentine cards into it. His mother had been to Slo-Mart to buy a gross of Valentines, or maybe she thought "Be Mine, You Swine," the type of romantic couplet on most of them, was gross--hard to tell which, because the word "gross" always followed her trips to Slo-Mart...

Anyway, he had the Valentine cards to drop into the coffee cans of his classmates, but he needed the receptacle for his own, because his parents do not drink coffee, so his Grandpa and Grandma not only provided a fair-trade coffee can for him, but actually walked into his classroom with it just before school ended, and handed it to Mrs. Scheiny, which is not a good name for a teacher, because of what it rhymes with, and then they hung around and waited for him, while all his classmates looked on in wonder, because Grandpa is the fashion leader for the whole town, until class was over, because it was their day to take him and his sister to their house after school, which was a good thing, because Grandma always had her famous homemade pizza and chocolate chimp cookies for them, which is a perfectly balanced after-school snack, but it meant he had to listen to Grandpa tell about Valentine card exchanges when he was Johnny's age, and Grandpa's 11-year-old romance, which involved a girl named Stella.

Johnny and his sister, Betsy, do not normally take Grandpa's tales of past romances seriously. After all, his girlfriends all had names like Mary Christmas and Ann Droid and Dee Light and Flora Duh. Except for this Stella, whose last name was simply Richardson, so it sounded real, and she had long curly brown hair, and was very pretty, except it had been so long that Grandpa couldn't remember exactly what she looked like, which sounded a bit suspicious, since his memory had been quite sharp until Grandma walked into the room right after the curly brown hair part.

The way Grandpa described Stella, she sounded a lot like Ellen in Johnny's own class, but who, besides Grandpa, would think about doing something like taking all his birthday money and buying a heart-shaped box of chocolates and then walking six blocks in the dark and cold to deliver it to a girl like Ellen, who wasn't even all that pretty, except in comparison to all the other cooty-laden girls in the whole school.

It was all very embarrassing and ominously foreboding.