Fried Baloney and Onions Please

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Lunch is no longer an event in my life.

I know that I spend a lot of time pretending that I'm a big fat guy, but I'm really not. I'm not that far out of shape.

(Shut-up, Pops).

I usually eat fairly well each day and as time has passed I've sort of started to...gasp...eat less.

I love eating. When the food is good, I'll eat and eat and eat. Growing up, with Mom and Dad cooking, the food was always good. When I have the time to cook right, I can still put some pasta or sausage or pork chops away.

But over the past year or so I've stopped eating like there's a gun to my head at lunch. In fact, it's usually just a single sandwich and sometimes I...gasp...try and eat something healthy.

But on Thursday at about 11:30 I happened across one of the big lunch wagons that has become all the rage around downtown Buffalo.

And I saw the sign.

"A pound of fried bologna on a hard roll with fried onions and mustard."

My hands were shaking as I forked over the five bucks.

You see, big fried bologna sandwiches are served on one of the golf courses around here. I usually scarf down one of those at the turn with the rest of the Grape Apes also doing the slam down the sandwich dance.

Hate to say it, guys...

...the sandwich I ate in my car while reading the sports made that golf club sandwich look like a PB&J. The pound of friend bologna was a single piece about the size of a bike tire.

I freaking devoured it.

Then I swore as loud as I could when I looked up from my frenzy and realized that the damn truck had moved on.

I wanted another one.

And it would have been too much, of course, but as I'm fond of telling my beautiful wife,

"There's something magical about eating enough to cause pain."

"Damn that was good," I whispered to the inside of my truck.

The aroma of the sandwich was still lingering. I thought about what a nutritionist might say about a nearly 50-year old man eating such a sandwich. I should be well into the grass-eating-until-fade portion of my culinary life, but I honestly dismissed such negative thinking quickly.

And I went on a neighborhood search for that damn truck.

The ending is sad.

I couldn't find her.

But Friday is a new day!

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