[1] He confessed he didn't like me using his bathrobe because I'd wear it sitting on the toilet.

[2] "It's not like it goes in the water," I protested, though if you counted the sash as part of the robe, this wasn't strictly true.

[3] "Doesn't matter," Ed said. Ed has a theory that anything that touches the toilet, even the top of the closed lid (which I pretty much use as a dressing table in the mornings) is unclean and subject to the sanitary laws of Leviticus. Things came to a head one evening at a local eatery. When Ed returned to the table after washing his hands, I told him there was no rational reason to do that unless he was planning to handle his food and then leave it sitting out at room temperature for three or four hours before eating it. This reminded me of something I had recently learned in the course of my work, which is not even raccoons wash up before eating. Yes, according to David McCullough, of Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, raccoons are not washing, but merely handling their food. They do that even when there's no water around. "It's a tactile thing," he told me. "They have extremely sensitive hands, and one idea is that are just fulfilling a need to feel food moving around in their paws."

[4] I told this to Ed. He looked like he wanted to strangle me, and Professor McCullough too. I followed his gaze to the true source of his emotion: the restaurant's cook. The man had his right hand tucked in his left armpit and was absently massaging the flesh as he read our dinner order and prepared to contaminate Ed's halibut.

[5] "Big deal," I said. "He's wearing a shirt. Maybe he has extremely sensitive hands and it fulfills a need."

[1] Ed called me insane. I called him abnormal. He was right, I was right. We decided we canceled each other out and that together we made one sane, normal entity, at least compared to, I don't know, raccoons. Then Ed did something very touching. He reached over and kissed my hand, which we both knew hadn't been washed since the night before.