[written sometime during the pandemic]

Maybe 25 years ago we were at a yard sale in Los Feliz and saw a box of wine glasses. It was about fifty assorted glasses, the remains of many a complete set. Dude said some of them went back thirty or forty years. Five bucks for a couple generations of wine glasses. The people attending our parties had been rough on our nice glasses. Plus me being so huge I shattered a couple just holding them (true). One I put down on a table after a sip, misjudged the velocity and the fragility of your tiny world, and shattered the glass on the table, much to everyone’s surprise but my wife. He does that, she said. Anyway, the fifty new old wine glasses lasted longer than you could have imagined, considering my oafishness and the barbarism of our friends, probably because everyone is so old now that breaking things is hard, but we’re down to the very last one. So either we drink wine out of Dixie cups or buy some more glasses. I found some we liked on the website of one of the doomed but clinging to life big box stores and ordered them. Easy enough. They came today. Four in a box. Lovely things, though apparently I’d forgotten what a world of lushes we now live in and hadn’t considered the size of the glass. No mere Lilliputian wine glasses of old, these were big enough to fit a human head. And I think there’s four more coming. That’s eight human heads. Two quartets worth. Alas, we live in one of those early Depression era Spanish style duplexes atop a hill in Silver Lake with not enough outlets or closet space, and certainly not enough cupboard space for eight human heads worth of long stemmed wine glasses. We don’t even drink enough wine for eight human heads worth of long stemmed wine glasses, I mean I’m epileptic and she’s from Milwaukee. Oh well, the problems of the modern retiree.