^{Photo by Carol Madigan}

   Carol decided to go to Urgent Care after a bee sting she’d experienced a week before had continued to bother her. (Never mind she stepped on the bee while walking barefoot on the beach. Barefoot? On a beach? I mean the sand, the surf, the whole idea of bare feet walking on a place where an ocean literally goes to throw up. The bee was probably walking barefoot on the beach before it encountered Carol’s foot. Hello?)

   I don’t like to see Carol in discomfort of any kind, so I encouraged her to seek medical attention. This, of course, entails a visit to a doctor’s office, which (I hadn’t considered at the moment I said it) would entail her being weighed and her height being recorded at check-in.

   Mind you, I don’t care how tall Carol is (she’s short enough that the rain hits her last, and I love that about her), but her weight seriously matters to her, in ways it doesn’t matter to me. (I’ve come to look at weight as the measure of just how much enjoyment and good fortune you’ve managed to squeeze out of the basic survival necessities of eating and drinking. In my own case, for example, I’ve lived a commendably jolly and lucky life.)

   Carol’s PM to me after checking into her appointment was, “I’ve got to go on a diet!”

Yeah, I know. I should be a partner to my beloved spouse. And I’ve always thought I would, but I also thought that funnel cakes, elephant ears, corn dogs and deep fried Oreoes would be part of that partnership.

   I will tell you that not since the ignominious “cabbage soup diet” that preceded our previous fall photo shoot for this blog, had I’d ever been so terrorized by a thought of being led once again to anything resembling a reduction in calories that, when fully calculated out over time, could be compared to an intentional genocide.

   Yes, I exaggerate. But suddenly cutting garlic bread, French fries, potato chips and chocolate chip cookies out of an otherwise high-carb – low-common sense diet might be construed as sensible, but certainly extreme. I mean, I’ve got a freezer full of chicken fingers, onion rings, mozzarella sticks and jalapeño poppers. What am I supposed to do..donate it all to a food bank? (Would a food bank even accept any of this? They’re not in business to expand obesity, are they?)

   Yeah, I know. I should be a partner to my beloved spouse. And I’ve always thought I would, but I also thought that funnel cakes, elephant ears, corn dogs and deep fried Oreoes would be part of that partnership.

    Yet, no way is Carol one of those partners that insist you join them in their personal commitments. She is a free-range spouse. She will order the kale and hummus salad with tofu tips and alfalfa sprouts, without any expectation that I will graze along with her. I remain perfectly free to order the fried calamari, homemade potato chips, bacon-mac-and-cheese burger and the molten mud pie, with a shot of Macallan 15 to close out the night.

   You get the point. I might as well be sitting home drinking alone in the dark. All right, so that’s what I’m doing now, trying to figure out how to accommodate Carol’s genuine desire to lose weight with my own of trying to enjoy the finer things in life, while making sure those size 40 shorts come with a stretch feature in the waist.