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The Barbecue

Recently, a few college buddies and I decided to get together to hang out, and we settled on a back yard barbecue. I expected a good time and some banter, but even so, folks managed to surprise me. It was more than just a tad amusing.

First off, since we were all going to contribute, we sent a bunch of emails back and forth about foods to bring. I suggested anticuchos at one point, and everyone was on board with this plan. So, I planned on picking up some cow heart (that's what anticucho is made from) from a butcher the day before. However, my old college roommate happened to have a butcher friend, so he beat me to it. The problem, however, was that he was in Berkeley and the heart was in San Francisco.

Well, between cars, public transportation, and plain old coordination, we figured we'd have this problem licked. This was not to be. First off, someone had to pick up the heart on a Thursday, so I was at work during the day. I asked if we could pick it up the next day, but that wasn't going to work. To make things worse, I'd made plans to go out that night, so I wasn't going to be home until later than usual. The simplest course of action, where I picked up the package, simply wasn't going to work.

So, instead, my Berkeley friend made his way into the city, and he procured the cow heart. Next, he asked if he had to do any prep work with it to make proper anticuchos. That was a pretty reasonable question, but, unfortunately, the answer was that I usually marinated the meat overnight. He had the heart, but I had the spices. We could change up the preparation a bit, but he preferred a more traditional recipe. So, I then drove out to him the next day to pick up the heart, and then drove home. This was doubly amusing because I was hosting the barbecue the next day, so he was basically going to do the reverse of my trip the very next day. I'm pretty sure someone made a, "it's been so long since I've seen you" joke at some point.

That, however, wasn't even close to the funniest thing that happened. No, that title went to a loaf of bread. As it turned out, the same friend was walking out of a building the next day when he spotted a loaf of bread in a plastic bag with a note attached to it. When he told us this story, most of us assumed it was a thoughtful gift for a homeless person. My buddy initially assumed this, too, so he kept walking. However, he happened to take a second glance at the note, and it said something to the effect of, "to the person who finds this bread."

At this point in the story, he looked around with a twinkle in his eye and a grin on his face, and said, "that was me. I found this bread." I mean, he wouldn't want to be rude or anything, right? Intrigued, he grabbed the loaf and actually read the note. The hand writing wasn't spectacularly good or bad, but the way it was signed seemed to denote a kid was responsible. We hypothesized that the kid's parent had helped with the actual note, but the kid had signed their name at the bottom. The note basically said, "hello stranger, you're welcome to this bread. I don't know you, but please take this with my blessing. Hope you like it."

Well, that made it all okay, right? My buddy was basically giving the loaf of bread a good home like the little kid had intended. His argument was more or less that he did exactly as instructed, and the generosity did not go unappreciated. We all gave him a bit of crap for it, but there were quite a few laughs at this point. And, hell, if he'd already brought it over and sliced it up, we might as well dig in. There was no point in letting the bread go to waste.

And that, my friends, is the story of the well-traveled anticuchos and the surprisingly-traveled loaf of bread at the back yard barbecue.

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