A Fried Egg Sandwich

As I approach the completion of my 65th trip around the sun, the thing that is on my mind the most is… food.

Best I can tell, I have had somewhere just north of 45,000 meals. This doesn’t include all the snacking and drinking that has gone on between them all! If I were to guess, the total number of truly healthy meals out of that group is… maybe… 500.

See, I’m a southerner. Even though we are approaching the time of year we will have access to an unbelievable cornucopia of the finest of vegetables this planet can produce, we are under a sacred obligation to improve upon this natural bounty by cooking them in an appropriately significant portion of pork or pork renderings. Apparently through some very sophisticated scientific studies, it has been determined that all flavor in anything comes from 2 sources… fat and calories. The more of both, the better the flavor.

But the thoughts of today are related to things I don’t really eat these days… I use to eat fried bologna sandwiches almost like they were the air that I breathed… grill some bologna and a little onion in some bacon grease… white bread and mustard and there you have it! Or a can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew… with a mayonnaise sandwich (just mayo on some bread… go figure!). I now realize this sounds a bit disgusting but it was a thing when I was young.

The one that is on my mind the most right now is a fried egg sandwich. I can not even remember the last time I had one. Fry an egg in some bacon grease… just as you are about to flip it, break the yolk, turn it over and let it cook until the yolk is almost completely done (a little runny is okay, but not too much)… put it on some toasted white bread with yellow mustard and a slice of sharp cheddar cheese and there you have it… Life couldn’t possibly get any better than that!

Got to stop now… I hear an egg and some white bread calling my name!

“The Circle”s of Life

You all know the place. You use to go there every Friday night. Every town in the US had this place… the place where all the high school kids hung out and all kinds of shenanigans were committed or initiated before they moved to other undisclosed locations.

The town I grew up in had several of these places…The Circle, Tuck’s BarBQ, Waterfront Park, and the mall parking lot across from McDonald’s were the main ones. The one I hung out at was The Circle. I believe it is still in business even today. But back then, there was no curbing at the highway and the parking lot was dirt and somehow it seemed we could get 60 cars in an area that was designed to accommodate 40 at best. You didn’t want to get there too early or you may get your car caught up in the middle and not be able to get out any time soon. But you didn’t want to be too late either because you may miss something!!

We would show up in the parking lot with our beer (yet, most of us were underage but did it really matter?) and would sit on the hoods / trunks of our cars and talking about who was dating who, who was running around on who, who was going to get in a fight with their best friend over something so important that it was… well, over nothing at all actually. The local police knew EXACTLY what was going on (since they had done this when they were younger too) so when they would come by, they would slow way down, put their windows down and listen and sometimes stop and talk with us. We would all make some lame attempt to try to hide the beer we were drinking, like they didn’t know we were drinking. They would just smile and wave and keep moving as long as we were “behaving”.

So after a while we had heard all the stories there were to hear and drank all the beer there was to drink, we would pile into car and head out to find more beer, more stories and more shenanigans. How in the world we survived those days continue to amaze me. I would never want to go back to those days of insecurities and basic drunken stupidity but I’m kinda glad I have them in my memory.