Chicken Soup for the Chocolate Lover's Soul by Mark Victor Hansen

Author:Mark Victor Hansen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Health Communications, Inc.

The Míckey Capers

Researchers have discovered that chocolate

produced some of the same reactions in the

brain as marijuana. The researchers also discovered

other similarities between the two,

but can’t remember what they are.

Matt Lauer, NBC’s Today Show

My dear friend Betsy’s mother, Mickey, an octogenarian, is obviously the person most responsible for Betsy’s outrageous sense of humor . . . one of the main reasons Betsy and I have been friends since 1981. I’m not sure if my fondness for Mickey is because she has a devilish twinkle in her eye every time she comes to visit from the East or because my own mother died years earlier at age fifty-seven, and I think of Mickey as a sort of mother figure. Whatever it is, for some reason as our friendship grew, I decided to start a “gotcha gift” exchange with my favorite surrogate mother many years ago.

Over the years Mickey and I have gift-wrapped the dumbest stuff you could imagine, oddball items found mainly at yard sales and pawned off on each other admidst merriment and mayhem, mostly during the Christmas holidays or birthdays.

One Christmas I stopped at Betsy’s house to see Mickey during her annual holiday visit and to deposit her annual “gotcha gift” under Betsy’s tree. If I remember correctly, it was a horrible T-shirt I’d fashioned from some red and black knitted afghan squares I’d found at a rummage sale. And, like always, there was a gift for me from Mickey under the tree.

I couldn’t wait to see what that year’s worthless, goofy gift would be. When the time came for me to open mine, I was shocked to discover not a gag gift, but instead a box of Whitman’s chocolates, the big box, two layers tall. “Mickey!” I shouted, “You’re not supposed to get me a real gift, you know that. What did you do this for? I got you something stupid, as always. Honestly, you shouldn’t have. But you know how much I love chocolate. So this is very, very sweet of you.” I couldn’t stop gushing over the first real gift she’d ever given me.

I got up to give her a hug, trying to decide if I should open the box right then and there and share it with everyone in the room, or if I should take it home unopened and savor each delightful piece of my chocolate treasure. Secretly, I was wanting to take it home and pig out by myself. But Betsy, also a chocolate lover, had other ideas.

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