Last night as I was talking to my beloved husband in Atlanta as I drove through Durham (yes, I’m one of THOSE people), I could hear loud voices and music in the background.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Twain’s,” he said. “I’ve ordered wings. It’s 9:00 and I haven’t eaten since noon.”

This didn’t surprise me. Before we married, you could find Fred here just about any night of the week, sitting at the bar next to a plate littered with a few scraps of bone and animal flesh, reading Zizek, his Greek New Testament, or some other book without an actual narrative, or perhaps drawing a picture of a kitten on a napkin.

We talked for a while and the noise suddenly increased. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was me eating the celery.”

“That’s okay,” I said, relieved that some fiber had finally entered his system. “At least it’s a vegetable.”

“You know,” he continued, “celery supposedly has negative calories. You burn more calories eating it than it has. So it should offset the effect of the wings.”

I really miss that man.