Things you think about while lying next to your wife at night

I have a couple of medical conditions that require me to take a prodigious number of pills each day. And by prodigious, I mean I take so many pills that Elvis himself would take a look at them and say, "Hey, man, maybe you should take it easy there, Bubba.''

I have a weekly pill holder that allows me to dole out my pharmacological needs on a daily basis. My wife, Susan, does me the favor of filling the thing up at week's end and allows me to be ready to be drugged up for the next seven days. It's a nice arrangement.

But as Sue and I were lying in bed the other night, I somehow began to think of palace intrigues in Italy about a half-millennium back, about the Borgias and such. I turned to Sue and said, apropos of nothing except my own reverie, "You know, you could probably slip poison into my pill box and I would never notice until it was too late to do anything but turn blue and expire.''

"You're right,'' she said. And she kissed me on the cheek, smiled sweetly, turned off her light and went to sleep. Which is more than I can say for me.