BACON: Lord how I envy Chloe. She can eat the stuff by the pound while maintaining perfect blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and weight. Yet as much as I envy my wife, I pity myself more for having the portly beast struck from my diet – although, thinking objectively, my pity should lie with the swine for tasting so fine.
EGGS: Yes, she can still eat those, too. And the way Lucy cooks them for her – over-easy in a shower of salt and a pool of butter! Chloe sets forkful after forkful carefully on her diminishing square of equally-butter-drenched toast, crowning each bite with a half a strip of that crisp, porcine heaven. Watching her is both agony and ecstasy.
METAMUCIL: Another breakfast experience we don’t share, but believe me, I see no look of envy in her eyes when we sit across from each other at the breakfast table and, while dabbing a smudge of liquid gold from her amused bouche, she watches me partake of my vile morning sludge. Ultimately, I suppose, the yoke is on me.
KALE: Mercifully, we’re well stocked with all things photosynthetic until our next grocery delivery – except for the stuff that’s supplanted Popeye’s choice of leafy greens as the masses’ new sustenance for besting their metaphorical Blutos. Hopefully, there’s no national shortage and I won’t have to shoulder my way through a frantic mob at the kale stand to get to it.
ECO-GREEN CLEANSER: Either I quit showering every morning – advice I would not give to any man of my girth – or Rosie will have to start coming in daily rather than thrice weekly. I could rotate bathrooms, but all of the others are just too inconvenient, so for now I’ll continue to wipe down the ensuite enclosure’s walls myself on her off days. A pox on white marble, especially vast expanses of the delicate statuario variety mined from select quarries in Italy.
BEER: Samuel Adams New World; just one, kept in the refrigerator to chill until 10:00 p.m. then nursed till night’s end in the study. Oh, the need, the ache, the wait, like a drowning man’s desire for a single gulp of life-giving air with water’s surface scant feet away.
CIGARETTES: Newport 100s. Another of the alluring vices a man of my waxing age and waning well-being must attempt to resist when he replaces his long-time mate with a younger, more hedonistic model; but this truly is Chloe’s most covetous habit, and how she rubs it in. Case in point? She departed twenty minutes ago, a study in blue spandex, and bounds along Park Avenue like a faun in spring at this very moment, completing another of her 5k runs. Yet she’ll befoul her seemingly impervious lungs (while gulping a steaming cup of java . . . laden with cream and sugar, no less!) the moment she steps through the elevator doors. She has only five – well, four now – remaining in her last pack, so I’ll fetch her a carton. Truthfully, though, the way she wears her almost-adolescent sense of invulnerability on her sleeve is starting to irritate me – not to mention bolster my beta blockers’ impotence-inducing side effects; yet I must endure.
So here it is: The list; my raison d’etre for the next ninety minutes. It is three full blocks to Bruno’s Fine Food Emporium, but I’ll not take one of the cars. Thus, I may claim a constitutional of my own, while bearing gifts, no less, when she greets me upon my return.
POSTSCRIPT:
On May 5th, 2023, a group of horrified onlookers watched as sixty-three-year-old Francis Poole toppled to the sidewalk outside of Mort’s Deli, the victim of a fatal acute myocardial infarction. The New York Post’s front page captured the event’s immediate aftermath, showing a shocked crowd gathered around his bulky, supine figure in front of the popular Midtown-Manhattan eatery. In the newspaper’s photograph, culled from one of seventeen iPhone submissions, he clutched a toasted bacon-and-egg sandwich, a single bite removed, in one lifeless hand, and a crushed coffee cup in the other. The cup’s contents lay splattered across the chest of his otherwise crisp, white hoodie like a pair of beige angel’s wings, and the filter tip of a Newport 100 peeked out mischievously from behind his right ear.
His face bore an odd look of contentment.
Poole, in a career cut tragically short, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Man Booker International Prize, and two National Book Awards. The above piece, found folded and urine soaked in one of his sweat-pants pockets, was published posthumously in Inkhorn Magazine’s prestigious summer 2023 flash fiction edition. The original document now resides in The Morgan Library & Museum.
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