You’ve heard of Maine’s Lost Kitchen, where dinner per person could come to $265. The way I heard it, you could only get a reservation by sending them a postcard. The restaurant gets around 20,000 postcards, and only a few of them are selected.

Were I to send in a postcard, I could boast that my wife Marsha and I had gambled on having a $500 dining experience most people can only dream of. With my luck, I’d probably get chosen.

If I want an exotic meal, I’ll eat at home. My wife is an excellent cook and she gave me asparagus for three days last week, which is as exotic as you can get on the Maine coast in April. You might not believe what my Facebook friends wrote on my page when I said I was eating asparagus: “No nutrition. Not the kind of food you need.”

That alone indicates that asparagus must taste good and be fun to eat and easy to swallow. People who do not care for asparagus probably ordered it in fine restaurants where you can break a tooth on it by simply nibbling. When I tell my friends I like my asparagus boiled for almost an hour, some say, “Oh, if it’s boiled to death, it won’t have any nutritional value left for you.”

I ask you: When you look around in a restaurant and see a happy couple clinking glasses over their table, do you think they are out on the town seeking nutrition? How many people eat out seeking nutrition? The same goes for eating at home. If I were to say, “Let’s have a nutritious meal for a change,” my wife would have probable cause to call the ambulance and have them cart me away.

***

Last week she wouldn’t have had to call; they were already here. I was feeling poorly and asked if they’d drop by and hook me up to the EKG machine. When they got here, one of my ambulance friends asked me what day it was.

This is a tough question for an old person. The letters on my pill boxes tell me what day it is. White box in the morning. Blue box at night. When you are 88, it really doesn’t matter what day it is – as long as you remember to eat your pills and send a column to the editor on Thursdays.

Toward the end of the month you get your CMP power bill, which is exciting, and you pay your credit card bill. You wonder how it can be $1,400 and then you remember that you paid $750 ahead on your power bill and half that much for insurance on a car and pickup truck you never drive. Then you ate a bunch of asparagus, which would cost you a month’s labor in more than a few countries.

Facebook friend Cliff says his life revolves around Wednesday, rubbish day. It anchors him.

Rockland’s Al Gardner says: “If It wasn’t for my pill boxes, I would never know what day it is.”

I don’t know what kind of question ambulance drivers should ask to determine the ability of a patient to reason. Do you? Another Facebook friend suggested it should be: “Who was elected president in 2020?”

***

It is hard to believe that I once went nine years without eating sweets. I was 175 pounds and couldn’t bend over to tie my shoes. After nine years, when I ended up at 145 pounds again, I started to eat sweets. But my body was so used to losing weight that no matter how much pie and cake and cookies and ice cream I ate, the pounds kept dripping away.

Remember my story about rhubarb pie when I started to eat sweets again? I had two pieces. When I reached for a third, Marsha said: “No, no, no.”

I said, “Wait a minute. For nine years I have had no rhubarb pie. If I eat one more it will mean only one piece of rhubarb pie every three years. Is that too much?”

Overcome by my coolly calculated mathematical reasoning, Marsha caved. Intelligent women become weak in the knees when confronted with logic.

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