You should eat beans with every meal

In case you're wondering what we do for amusement when my husband is on travel. Tonight I got out a bag of lentils I had bought during an ambitious run of pot-lucks and went rifling through the cookbooks trying to find some use to which they could be put. The hippie recipe for which they had been intended turned out, upon second reading, to be way too weird. Plus, it involved dates and other exotica that we don't keep in the house. I turned to a classic and they had a lentil dish served with Italian sausage that was to die.

I do fondue

When Beloved is on travel, we often experiment. He and Jones are meat-and potatoes men, but Jones is out-voted when Dad is away.

Tonight, we had gorgonzola fondue, which I bought in bulk from the Harry & David's outlet on the way to pick up the kids from camp. Fondue seems not to have been a big seller for H & D, judging from the big tower of the stuff. More for me, then.

The Lanyard

And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift--not the archaic truth


that you can never repay your mother,


but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

--------
Excerpted from The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems by Billy Collins