If I had only seen this side of your face, and you were with a group of your friends...

I am in the supermarket. I don't really know what I'm doing here. I decide to check out the books, and soon I stand before the magazines, stuffing my own mouth full of toothpicks (the blood tastes like the cherry tooth-gelatin they had at the dentist's office when I was a kid). While my mouth gushes cherry, I focus on the magazines, which get only my brief attention; to my left, a lecture is going on in an infernal, terra-cotta amphitheater, in which my Spanish literature professor (a demon) discusses the ghost of José Arcadio Buendia. Like my maternal grandfather he haunts in a welcome way his family's gatherings.

I finally find what I'm looking for: Cormac McCarthy's The Road, perhaps my favorite book. Having accomplished a great deal, I walk to the pharmacy, which is also the bathrooms. As I am keeled over a tiny wastebasket full of paper cups, pulling the toothpicks out of my mouth, I realize that there are far more inserted than I remember inserting. And the cherry flavor is gone. Long gone. It is here that I realize why I am going to the pharmacy. I have diabetes. As it happens, the ominous "they" has found a link between bipolar disorder and diabetes. And I have both. I have been gone all weekend to Little Rock, remembered my bipolar drugs, forgotten my insulin syringes. I turn to my left and catch a glimpse of cousin Philip: "I hardly recognized you," I say.

"Yeah, that happens a lot," he says.

"I feel the same way," said cousin Thomas who has been standing nearby, listening in on our conversation. "I mean, we hardly see each other."

"I know," I say.

"If I had only seen this side of your face" - I take his head in my hand and cock it to demonstrate to Thomas - "and you were with a group of your friends..."

I look at them both for a moment:

"I don't think I'd recognize you at all."