Food and Marriage

1. Love & Hair

There is a woman who loves her husband very much. Every morning she prepares him a bountiful fruit salad with all of his favorites; strawberries, bananas, blueberries, green apples, and raspberries chopped up into tiny pieces. She tops it with almond yogurt, pecans, sliced almonds, walnuts, and chia seeds. She steeps his turmeric tea and gently stirs it. Before putting his fruit salad before of him, she plucks one hair from her head and strategically places it inside so that he won’t know it's there. You see this woman loves her husband so much that she wants him to carry a piece of her inside of him as he goes about his day. They laugh and chat over breakfast as usual and make love before they go to work.

One day while her husband is walking from the BART station to his office he feels a tickle in his throat. The man begins to cough and choke. Something large. Something that shouldn’t be there is trying to come up. He grasps at his neck as passers by give strange confused looks. A few stop to try and help. He thinks of his beautiful wife and envisions her smile and hears her laughter that’s always such music to his ears.

The EMT arrives a hair too late. The man is lifeless once she reaches him through the crowd of onlookers. His phone is ringing. The EMT picks it up as the woman speaks, “hello, my sweet love.”

At the autopsy the coroner can see that this man has choked to death by the tell tale signs; asphyxiation. He opens the mans lips and pulls a large mass of what looks to be long bundled human hair.

The woman sits in disbelief for hours at a time. Staring at the wall, unsure of what to do. Then she weeps.

***

Each morning the woman lovingly prepares her breakfast fruit salad with a piece of her own hair and a cup of tea. She loves her husband so much. She loves him to death. Soon they will be together again.

2. Digestion

Your gut is the key to your health. Have you heard of this saying?

My husband and I learned about the importance of burping. You hear about burping infants, but it is essential for proper digestion to continue this practice in childhood and even adulthood. You want all of the stomach juices and gases to flow smoothly through your alimentary canal.

After meals we embrace one another and pat each others backs. This aids in digestion as you know. We find the benefits of this practice to be quite significant and decide to make a routine of it.

At the restaurant after our meal we get up for our ritual as we wait for the bill to come. Our friends start leaving quickly for various hurried reasons; each one less believable than the former.

Soon, we find our long conversations over post-meal coffee and dessert with friends to diminish significantly. They feel strained since our latest health practice began. We often go through phases of revamping our health routine without this kind of reticence from our friends.

It makes sense to start going to restaurants with single stall bathrooms so we can excuse ourselves and privately conduct our healthy adult burping routine. Perhaps it will lessen the discomfort of those around us.

Things resume to normalcy as our conversations become lively and lengthy once again. We split desserts, we order more espresso, and laugh into the night with friends. We keep our burping embrace in the bathroom stall a dirty secret between the two of us.