“Honestly,” I remarked to Paul while putting away groceries (oh, alright, a six pack) after a trip to the store, “whatever happened to southern hospitality? All I did was tell the cashier I had correct change and she nearly bit my head off.”

“That happened to me, too.” Paul replied, looking up. “Yesterday I asked a waitress in town if she wouldn’t mind putting my salad dressing on the side and you would have thought I’d asked her to give me her first-born child. Wonder what’s going on?”

“It’s those marriage signs!” I cried, infused with a bolt of brilliance. That’s what it’s all about.”

“What marriage signs?” Paul wanted to know.

It seems there was a romantic sort of fellow who staked a line of neon-green poster board signs, beginning at the exit ramp of I-26, and running straight through town that, when passed by car (or far more slowly and confusedly, on foot), created the question, word by word, on sign by sign: “Will You Marry Me?”

“The marriage signs,” I repeated. “It’s irritated a whole lot of women around here.”

“How do you figure that?” Paul asked, squashing a perfectly good loaf of bread to make sure his Heineken was nestled comfortably on the middle rack and nowhere near my unsophisticated, domestic, variety, in the fridge, “Because all I ever hear, and I mean, ever hear, from women, is how unromantic and unthoughtful men are. So I would think, if anything, reading that kind of romantic declaration of love would give everyone the warm fuzzies.”

“Typical.” I chided. “Typical guy kind of thought. But here’s the deal: while our White Knight has hammered in all those signs, he never wrote her name, did he? He never wrote, “Will you marry me, Melissa? Or Amy? Or Bertha?”

“Very few people marry a Bertha,” Paul countered.

Dismissing his point with a wave of my hand, I continued.