I haven’t mentioned Southern Cousin in such a long time. She and I hit it off pretty well at work and over the course of time we have found we have lots in common.
I mean, do you know how hard it is to find a Moody Blues AND Gordon Lightfoot fan?!
Yeah.
We are a bit divergent on movies — especially comedies — and try as she might, I’m not quite the bookworm she’d like me to be, although I really liked “The Shell Seekers”…the first and last book I had read in a long time, after she suggested it.
Anyway, this week I discovered that she had also signed up to have a corned beef lunch brought in to work by a lady supporting her synagogue’s fund raiser.
I love corned beef.
So one day this week, at 8:30 AM, I had this beautifully odoriferous corned beef lunch sitting in my cubicle.
I wanted to eat it RIGHT NOW.
I saw Southern Cousin round the corner with her little corned beef lunch sack and waved at her — hey, I got one too!
“Aren’t you putting it in the refrigerator?”
“Naw — it will be okay here.”
Did I mention that Southern Cousin is often more sensible than I am?
An hour went by.
I put the beautifully odoriferous corned beef lunch in my cube’s closeable storage space.
Another hour went by. It was getting increasingly odoriferous.
And I was drooling.
So I double bagged it in plastic and put it in the break room refrigerator.
Towards lunch time I shot an email to Southern Cousin, wondering if she was going out to eat her wonderfully odoriferous corned beef lunch “outside” to spare the rest of our co-workers and if I could tag-a-long.
“Sure! Let’s go!”
She drove and wouldn’t you know it, “The Way” by Fastball came on her CD player.
We quote it back and forth to each other all the time. This time she turned it up loud, rolled down the windows and we sang it all the way in to town.
Looney birds.
There are plenty of parks in O-town, so we went to one and found a pick-a-nick table, and opened our deliciously odoriferous corned beef lunches. Inside:
- a corned beef sandwich. Imagine that.
- kosher pickle in a ziplock
- Mrs. Fields tater chips
- two cinnamon biscotti in a ziplock
- plastic knife rolled up in a napkin
- mustard
We chatted away about life, kids, elderly parents, growing up, growing old — all the while munching away. Too soon it was time to head back to work, and we both saved our biscotti for later.
Next day I reached into my desk drawer for the biscotti — it was one of those days — thinking that a coffee/biscotti break would fix just about anything.
Munch munch munch…mmmmm….hmmmm?
Now isn’t that odd?
Later I saw Southern Cousin as she rounded the corner the other way — asked her how her day was going, told her I ate the biscotti…
“I ate mine too…um…”
“Yeah?”
“…did it taste like pickle?”
“Yeah…”
A cinnamony, pickle-ly biscotti.
Apparently whoever was in charge of the pickles was also in charge of the biscotti.
…pickle packer bags biscotti.
“Say that five times real fast.” — Southern Cousin
