To speak intelligently about this experience, I need to invoke another time, another place. Despite…read moremy desire for it to be otherwise, my mind drifts back to my days in Vietnam. At that time, meals were not something we could take for granted, flavor was not a luxury, and the MRE's were simply a way of keeping ourselves going, a necessary evil in the face of capital E Evil. I don't remember a single meal I ate in those days, and I'm glad for that.
Well, this experience was kind of like that. It was a hard day for many reasons - hot and humid amid the barren landscape of any available breakfast in all of Burnsville. Sad, but an understandable result of our times.
Imagine it - ordering a breakfast sandwich but no prices for any of the ingredients listed: will this sandwich be 9$ or $20? I can't know until it's time to pay, and by then it's too late (if I want to remain a gentleman).
And imagine further - a 20 minute wait in the upstairs so quiet, so empty, that even casual conversation with my comrade echoed off the walls for all to hear. My belly rumbling could even have been confused with flatulence, for which I am apologetic.
Picture the sandwich coming, my great relief, and the resulting disappointment to find that not a single piece of bacon awaited me. Bacon that I not only wanted, but needed.
Stay with me - I took the sandwich downstairs, hoping for a quick remedy, but alas, it was not to be. Another 20 minutes elapsed, and my compatriot finished his breakfast burrito which near broke his wallet (he does have a decadent streak). I walked downstairs, confused and distraught. The sandwich had been waiting all along, but I was not made aware. I took it upstairs and as a matter of principle, peeled back the bread to see two pale, thin, soggy pieces of bacon, as if they had simply pulled apart a microwave Jimmy Dean microwave breakfast sandwich and applied that wan and insulting offering to my "food."
I ate the sandwich, but I didn't enjoy it. I didn't enjoy even a single bite. And yet I knew that there was a whole day to live, and a trying journey to Ingles yet to come. I adjusted my attitude as I made some cursory field notes, which you are now reading, and resolved myself to, in the words of my friend and yours Charlie Kirk, carry the flame even as my digestive fire was dampened and abused.
This review is part of my process that I learned in harder times, because I saw in my father (and cousin Tommy) what repressing emotions can do. Thank you for reading, thank you for caring.