HE PREFERS VANILLA; I BEG TO DIFFER
Ode to Chocolate
I love my husband dearly, but there are things we will never agree on. He likes jazz and discordant modern classical music, for example. I like soft rock and all things melodic and harmonious. I like honesty. He likes being agreeable. He likes to pray that God will bend the laws of the universe in his favor. If I pray at all, I pray to understand the laws of the universe so I can do my best to get along in it. He likes to think about death. I like to think about living a healthy lifestyle to delay the inevitable. To him, dinner is not dinner unless there is meat. To me, meat is a luxury, one which is not necessarily good for you.
There are tons of other things we do agree on and enjoy together, but that's not so interesting.
The following poem is dedicated to him. Some folks have read it and vehemently defended vanilla or attacked the logic of the poem. It's tongue in cheek. I don't think any less of you if you are a vanilla fan.
He prefers vanilla, that favorite of the bourgeois masses.
His other tastes run to the finer things: classical music, fine poetry, theatre.
He would have come by a love for exquisite chocolate honestly;
his mother enjoyed all things chocolate.
I feed him two dark chocolate kisses daily for his health.
He eats them without complaint, but
his choice would be that blander pleasant-enough colorless flavor,
a good complement to pungent earthy brown chocolate, but lacking
that je ne sais qua to stand alone.
Who ever heard of coating a strawberry in vanilla?
Who woos with it?
Chocolate is the sine qua non of a treat.
