Chocolate or vanilla?

Ummm… what? What the hell kind of tomfoolery is this? That’s not a prompt; it’s a question someone at an ice cream shop would ask. Fine. I’ll play along with your silly reindeer games. Interestingly enough, which is to say not interestingly at all, I hated chocolate for most of my life. I was a silly, foolish thing, not unlike this prompt.

Going to a birthday party as a child was a special kind of anguish for me since they always had chocolate ice cream and chocolate cake. I’d never eat any and I’d have to explain to all the parents and kids why I wasn’t eating any of their damn cake. The parents would feel terrible that they had nothing besides chocolate sweets. In an ill-fated attempt to provide something for me, they’d rummage around in the kitchen trying to find me a treat, which was always second best to cake and I didn’t want it anyway. When my birthday rolled around, my mom made a special vanilla cake just for me.

Halloween was also torturous since people would somehow know that I didn’t like chocolate and give me nothing but Hershey bars, which I would promptly trade with my sister for a passel of Smarties and Skittles. For Easter, I got a white chocolate bunny. I love white chocolate, even though it’s not really even chocolate since it contains not a lick of cocoa.

My own grandmother, whom I fear was a bit senile, would forget that I didn’t like chocolate and give me a big bag of M&M’s along with my birthday present. I always gave them to my sister for nothing in trade.

It wasn’t until I became an adult, and well into adulthood at that, that I came around to the concept of chocolate. I still don’t like dark chocolate or chocolate-flavored things, e.g. cake and ice cream, all that much, but I have come around to the Hershey bar like any other sane person.

So, when you ask chocolate or vanilla, my first inclination is still towards vanilla, but depending on the circumstances, chocolate will do nicely. I’m growing into it.