Dear Robert Qualls

It seems that some young woman was completely overtaken by her affection for you during a trip to the Wal-Mart in my hometown. I know this because I purchased our bath towels there. Simple, relatively cheap, white bath towels for our master bathroom once we moved. At the time I put them in storage and forgot about them until we moved and said master bathroom was set up in the apartment. It was just a couple of days before my husband returned home from deployment that I noticed something was written on one of the towels. Not the towel itself, rather, but on the attached tag. In big, curvy handwriting that very obviously belonged to someone of the female gender a name had been inscribed with permanent black marker. It read, simply: Robert Qualls <3. And, yes, it was followed by the quirky little outline of a heart.

Now, I have seen messages of adoration for boyfriends and crushes written in some strange places like bathroom stalls (The last thing I care about when I have to pee bad enough to actually break down and use a public restroom is who hearts who.). But the tag of a cheap, Wal-Mart bath towel? One that she obviously wasn't even going to purchase? Why? What is the point? I suppose, in a strange way her affection for Robert will live on and be known by others. (Who needs an anti aging product when you can be immortalized on the tag of a bath towel?) But in all honesty, I really don't care that she hearts Robert. I just wanted a bath towel so that I could be dry after my shower. And now every time I happen to pick up this particular towel I stop and think of the complete ignorance a person must have to feel that writing someone's name in permanent marker on a product in a store that they aren't even going to buy must possess. Not to mention it really through Ryan for a loop when he returned to new towels and picked up one with some other guy's name on it in the first week he was home. That was an interesting conversation starter.