Way back when I was living in Baltimore, I used to keep a mayonnaise jar full of walnut halves on my desk. At the time, I was often parked in a creaky old office chair, writing something for a theory class or reading chapters for a literary class, and having no time to even think about cooking. The walnut jar became a quick and easy hunger basher that didn’t involve walking to the local Hardee’s for curly fries or putting up with the too small apartment kitchen that was prone to overheating. That jar was as much a fixture as the Christmas lights around my window that never came down or the cats parked on my bed watching the birdfeeder outside. No walnuts? No studying. No gaming. No desk.
When JJ first walked into my apartment and spied the walnut jar, he actually balked. Up until then, things had been pretty perfect, so I was really puzzled about why he looked at my room like it had kicked his dog. I thought maybe I hadn’t successfully eliminated the cat box aroma from the other room or that my roommate had left something questionable on the floor. When I asked him what was wrong, he revealed that he was severely allergic to nuts, his gaze fixed on the offending jar next to the keyboard. When he asked how often I ate them, he almost sounded melancholy. He was starting to fall in love with me then, and this could have been a, early deal breaker - the thing that would have killed the us before we even got a chance to be an us. Walnuts, my favorite of all nuts, turned out to be the absolute worst on JJ’s allergic reaction scale, a sort of 8.0 on the Richter Scale of food danger. Would I give up eating them so the kissing could continue without random trips to the hospital?
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Inspector Vino
