A few days ago, I sent Greg to the store without a list. It’s almost always a mistake to send him without a list, but every time I hope that he’ll take the initiative to look through our recipes and pick out a few. After this many years of marriage, I should know better.

The day after Greg’s trip, I assessed our fridge. I saw that he had bought hamburger buns to use with the ground bison we already had in the freezer.

“Greg, did you buy vegetables to go with the burgers?” I asked.

“I thought we already had tomatoes,” he said.

“Yeah, we do. I meant for a side dish,” I said. Greg furrowed his brow, but said nothing.

“You know, those things you put next to the burger on the plate so that when you get tired of eating red meat, you can have a bite of something green or yellow or orange,” I said.

“Why would you ever get tired of eating burgers?” Greg asked. I sighed. This was a lost cause.

“There’s some canned cranberry sauce in the pantry,” Greg said helpfully.

He’s a regular Julia Child, this one.

We’re hosting our book club meeting tomorrow night. This means we will have a lot of new people in our home who will be eating food, so Abe will feel inclined to make a complete fool of himself. One of the members of our club is allergic to cats, so we plan to lock Winston upstairs even though we know that won’t completely alleviate the allergies. Abe, however, is not so easily managed. I figured we would give him free rein and hope for the best. Greg had other ideas.

“It seems like we should have some more substantial food,” he said, as we discussed the hors d’oeuvres.

“Well, I could make meatballs,” I said. “But Abe plus meatballs doesn’t seem like the best idea.”

“We aren’t going to have Abe out,” Greg said.

“Well, what are we going to do with him?” I asked.

“We’ll put him upstairs in his cage,” Greg said. We have not put Abe in his cage in about three years. We used to keep him in it when we weren’t home so that he wouldn’t destroy everything, but he outgrew his chew-everything-in-sight phase. If we put him in the cage now, he claws frantically at the metal bars and whines. That usually degenerates to hysterical barking.

“Yeah, that’s going to go over great,” I said. “He’s going to bark lke crazy.”

“We’ll throw a towel over the cage and play music so he can go to sleep,” Greg said. “It’ll be just like bedtime.”

“Because we normally put him in a cage, throw a towel over it and play music at bedtime?” I asked. “And you think he won’t be able to hear us over the music? How loud is it going to be?”

“Really loud,” Greg said. “Down here, it will sound like mood music.”

I’m not making those meatballs.

My shameful and insulted moment at a party this last weekend, when mid-conversation, someone asked me a question:

“You’re a non-native english speaker, right?”

“Umm… no.”

“I mean english wasn’t your first language.”

“Yeah, I know. It was.”

“Really? It doesn’t sound like it.”