Our town is home to many treasures and wonders, a rolling panorama of travel-writer pornography, an orange sunset over the Square, a walk through Bailey’s Woods, a Saturday in the Grove.

Worthy of a space alongside these little poems, though, is the magical perfect drunk and/or hangover food: the Coop DeVille’s chicken bacon Ranchero.

Or, I guess I should say, was the perfect food.

It appears that The Coop, and its signature sandwich, have gone to the big Hoka in the sky. The phone number is disconnected. The website doesn’t work. There’s no information on the closed sign.

It looks abandoned.

The fryers have gone quiet, which is good for my arteries, but bad for my heart.

Maybe the owners got abducted by aliens, or Mississippi State fans, and maybe the place will come back as quickly and mysteriously as it disappeared.

I am fairly sure that if we snorted the old fryer grease we’d all become immortal.

Maybe it really is gone for good. Someone called me with the news a month or two ago, passed along in a solemn whisper. Because I refuse to really accept the fact that I’ve recently turned 40, I continue to occasionally eat like a 19-year-old, which means Sundays on the couch, football game on, pounding coffee and Gatorade, surrounded by a Styrofoam armada of grease and saturated fat, swimming in oceans of high-fructose corn syrup and MSG. I’m speaking, of course, of the little white time capsules delivered stunningly late by a stoner driver bringing over three different kinds of wings and, for me, the Ranchero.

I mean, what isn’t made better by ranch dressing? Someone told me a dirty joke once: How do you make an Ole Miss sorority girl (um, fill in your own blank here)? Put ranch dressing on it.

The food can be eaten in one frantic rush, or slowly over a long afternoon, but when you’re done comes the most important part. Quickly, those clamshells must go into the trash can, destroying the evidence, to get rid of the mounting shame spiral of guilt at the wreckage of tiny chicken bones and soggy piles of uneaten fries.

Few things suggest a reordering of priorities more than the evidence of a Coop fix.