Part 1 of 3

Forsooth, those were times when we were young. Some people like to look back on their youth and make some judgment about how foolish they were then:

"If I could do it all again, knowing what I know now?"

I am sensitive to cognitive dissonances, so I cannot do anything other than believe that I of then and I of now are the same person.

I had bought fresh squash in the morning because the season made the price low. I salt them and brush them with olive oil, then braise them. Now, only to think of a main course suited to this entremets. I called Baolichi, starting things off with a hypocorism, then with pretending to be a vicinal gay man.
"Balice-inha! How is your day? Let?s do lunch! We absolutely have to talk about what how our mutual friend Blarn has compromised her sex life!"
"Shut up. You are cute."
"I want to broil squash. What goes good with broiled squash?"
"I don?t know, whatever sounds good to you. I?ll eat whatever, so you act at your own peril."
"Chicken?"
"Fine. You?d have to take it out of the freezer. You don?t want to have to wait for it to thaw, do you? It?s not that I?m saying that I don?t want to eat chicken, but I?m just getting sick of eating the same thing every day."
"Then pork chops. Because those may be frozen, but they are thin and will thaw quickly."
"Make sure to use rosemary."

We had bound my ankle to hers so that as our corpses drifted down river, and as my abraded arm was seen protruding from the hollow of a patch of water hyacinths, which was how they found us, we would still be together.
Like this detail, most of them were planned out in the three days following the morning when we made the decision to go through with it. We both decided to take the day off of work to work through the mechanisms and the methodology, but it became three.
After we made up our minds to use a drug for the job, it took a full day to get a prescription from my cousin and godfather Blanchetto, who is a chiropractor. He said that there was certain paperwork that he?d have to file and that he had to receive a fax from the registry office.
"Do whatever you gotta do, bro, just get it for me when you can," I told him after he offered this excuse for the delay.
The next day involved choosing a spot and rehearsing the procedures. Baolichi went as far as defining the wardrobe, which was to be conservative but attractive. What we ended up choosing was a seventeen step dance move that we would carry out together, repeating it until we drifted off and our heads dipped under the water, humming seventeen notes of the ballad ?Todos somos de León.?

Pa / so / la / vi / da / llo / ran / do
Y / su / spi / ran / do
Le / ón / por / ti

On the third day we took care of practical matters, closing off any professional engagements and settling our accounts.
On the fourth day, we went back to work. I came home after a half-day. There was a minor public holiday that my company, out of generosity, observed partially.

Retirement is nice, but nobody says this until they try it. I would like to try to convince people that it is nice, maybe by going, as they did in the olden days, to a bus station, sitting on a bench and sipping from a green coffee mug that screamed out in rose red letters

WHO CARES? I?M RETIRED.

But no one here needs convincing. Everyone here is already retired. We spend most of the day playing cards, smoking and drinking coffee. The menu was recycled weekly, and on a night like this, a Wednesday, they ladle lobster lobscouse into warmed clay bowls, and we dip a crusty bread into it.
There is also hunting and parlor games.