U-Pick: Spineless*

On Saturday night, I made fish for dinner. Well, I made the salsa that went on top of the fish, and when Tiffany got home, together we slathered olive oil on the fillets, dusted them with salt and pepper, and put them in the broiler with a chunk of onion on top. In the process, we set the fire alarm off a few times and ran around the apartment opening all four of our windows and our front door.

Anyway, the fish had a lot of bones in it. One piece had more than the other, so Tiffany said she would take it. She knows I have a slight fear of fish bones. When I was about six, I choked on a bone in a restaurant in Florida and had to have an emergency room doctor reach down my throat with what looked like a long pair of tweezers. I boycotted fish for eight years.

After we took our fish out of the broiler and discarded the charred onion slices, we sat down to eat. I chewed each bite 164 times, just to be sure. Half-way through dinner, the edge of my plate was lined with the near-translucent spines.

"Man, this fish does have a lot of bones," I said.

Tiffany looked at her plate. Then, she looked at mine.

"Oh no!" she said. "I gave you the wrong plate! That was supposed to be my piece! I haven't found a single bone!"

"That's okay," I said, "one of us has to have the one with a lot of bones."

"I know, but I didn't want it to be you."

That's the kind of thing Tiffany does (or tries to do) all the time, and it made me smile. But only for a second. I had to keep chewing.

*This final January U-Pick brought to you by Tiffany, who suggested I write a post in which she does not look obsessive-compulsive (see here and all posts under the label "Tiffany's Favorite Task"), grumpy (see here) or nerdy (see the title of my blog). I don't think she's any one of those things more than any other human on the planet, including me (in fact, I think she's those things far less than most humans on the planet, including me), but I see her point. Still, as anyone with half a brain can understand, it is only because Tiffany is so wonderful that I get to write about those things at all.