It’s cold and dark and we are at the end of an evening I don’t want to end. Only a year before I would’ve asked to buy you a night cap to keep the conversation going. But I’m sober now and the old mechanisms are no longer there. At a loss, the question just pops out — “Pie?” I ask. And like a fish caught in the hands from a clear sun dappled stream on an instinct, a flash of a thought that inspires movement and surprise, I catch you with it.

“Yes,” you say and something inside jumps.

And it’s still alive and jumping when three years later I tell the jeweler what should be inscribed in the ring.

Pie? Yes.