Take our marriage and replace it with blue cheese dressing,

the brand we like best and buy whether it's on sale or not. Surely there is another blue cheese dressing that is sold, possibly in San Francisco and made in a Berkeley basement by hippies who scrape together all of their change twice a year and buy cheese from an ancient sheep farm in France. This dressing is at least as good, maybe better than ours. I don't know. But I think it's unrealistic to say the delicious hippie sauce doesn't exist. And if it does, let's agree that you could very happily enjoy it with someone else. That I could be one of the hippies, still protesting nuclear weapons and more recently Styrofoam, long grey curly hair and flowy skirt, swaying to the beat of African drums as I label the dressings. That you and your wife come into the co-op and your index finger touches one of the labels, which is now slightly smeared. That you are downright joyful to have found your pungent dream manifest in a repurposed jelly jar. And instead of merely handing me the jars—your wife's eager to buy three—and reaching into your pocket to pull out an ample wallet without looking up, your blue eyes make a point to look into mine, naked and green as I wish to see the world, and for two moments we know that we could be happy together, maybe even happier than we ever thought possible, two hours from the east coast eating Marie's Premium Super Blue Cheese with the black plastic lid from Harris Teeter.