Bouquets of Chocolate (manxman)

Prologue - Memoirs #1

Most people had Christmas traditions, thanksgiving traditions if you're in the US. Maybe new years traditions. I had a Valentine's day tradition. Or I should say, we did.

When we were 8, Jordie had decided he had a crush. For the first time apparently. It was some girl in our grade I'd never seen before and he only once. I didn't bother telling him how silly that sounded and instead listened to him gush about her for about 10 minutes until he got distracted by my mum calling us down for dinner. That was in late January.

"Sammie!", he called out to me a week later, informing me in a blind panic that he'd overheard the girl saying how great it would be to receive home made chocolate for Valentine's day, because she'd overhead her older sister complain about gross store bought chocolate. I didn't really see what was so gross about store bought chocolate, but again I just kept my mouth shut and supported him like the good friend I was.

He then insisted on me helping him make said home made chocolate for his 'future wife', as he'd started calling her.

Now, two 8 year old boys with no kitchen experience past the (almost) daily dish washing after dinner, the occasional snack stealing and the even rarer pizza dough punching hardly seemed equipped to be taking on the task of making home made chocolate. Luckily, I was smart enough to enlist the help of my older sister who seemed to have an unusual amount of love for her 'super cute' little brother; me. At the time, as a prepubescent boy, I had found it beyond annoying, now I couldn't ask for a better second best friend.

With a squeal of excitement, through which I remembered hearing Jordie's name and 'first girlfriend' and 'so cute', she'd agreed to help us out.

It ended up with several session of chocolate covered surfaces, faces, hands and everything in between. Very little actual edible and good looking chocolate was produced in those sessions. And while Jordie was trying hard, he was clumsy, and I too busy trying to keep him from hurting himself or breaking something to pay much attention to anything. Two days before Valentine's was the last time Veronica had time to sit down with us and try to teach us something useful. Both of us failed miserably and I spent a good two hours after trying to console my best friend with all the toys, games and other fun things I could possibly find in my room. It only worked marginally.

My 8 year old brain didn't understand why it was so distressing to me to see Jordie in that sad state, but after he went home that evening, I wasn't able to calm down at all. I was constantly thinking about how sad he'd still been when leaving and eventually came to the conclusion that there was only one thing I could do to make it better.

So in the morning I pretended to leave for school, only to sneak back into my room immediately, used my walkie talkie to tell Jordie that I was sick and not going to school for the day, waited until my mum was out of the house, then sneaked into her office and gathered all the cook books I could find. I spent the entire day in the kitchen, teaching myself how to make the easiest chocolate recipe I could find, trying to remember as much as I could from what Veronica tried teaching us. When mum came home in a fury a few hours before her shift should have ended, she found me balancing on a low stool to reach the higher up shelves, the apron I had put on in the morning slipping off my left shoulder and my hands covered in so much chocolate, everything I touched would immediately be stained too.

Her anger vanished the moment I looked at her with wide, guilty eyes. I knew exactly what I'd done wrong, I was a smart kid, but I'd decided that Jordie's happiness was more than worth it.

Mum used her free few hours helping me rather than scolding me, understanding exactly what was going on in my head.

When I went over to Jordie's house the next day after school to make chocolate, we actually succeeded. He never asked why I suddenly knew all of the things I knew and was able to do all the things I showed him, but when we were done, he gave me a hug so strong, it was still my favourite Jordie hug to date, even though I got a lot of them even now.

Unfortunately, while we managed to make something acceptable, they still looked fairly clumsy, and his so called 'future wife' seemed to prefer shop bought chocolate from that other boy in her class over the home made ones Jordie worked so hard for. In the end, it ended up being the two of us sitting on a tire swing on the playground, sharing the chocolate between us. It was a bit bitter from probably burning it a little, but there was sweetness there, too.

From that year onwards we would make chocolate together for his crush every year and even when it became painful to help him impress other people, it was still my most favourite time of year. Because even if it was for strangers, will still did it together.