No Bugs for me thanks!

Teee heee... I have a special request! My dear old friend Cheryl Hajjar wants to know if I have a decent receipe for a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich anywhere on this blog.

Now this is a coded request, and in order to explain what she is really saying, I need to go back some 40 years to a time when Cheryl and I were doing our MFAs at Pratt Institute. Right across the campus, on the corner, was the coffee shop 'Mike's', and this is where we - the two of us and our darling friend Dina - would meet for lunch pretty much every day. Sometimes there were others too, but the three of us formed the central core of a wider group. So, we would sit there, putting the world to rights (not that we were terribly aware that there was anything amiss with it), endlessly discuss our menfolk, gossip about all and sundry. And also, not to forget, Mike's daughter Angie was usually a part of the confab, chiming in from behind the counter. All of it accompained by grilled cheese sandwiches.

OK - let me be honest here - mostly grilled cheese sandwiches for Cheryl. Dina and I would be just as likely to sit behind mountains of pastrami on rye platters or cheeseburgers or BLTs; and when we had the grilled cheese sandwich it would just as likely be a bacon and chesse concoction. Cheryl is a vegetarian, and was one all the way back then. A real one! One who really did stop eating things that came from creatures that had been alive at some point because she felt awful doing it. Dina and I hugely admired her for it, but did not take the plunge ourselves. Let me put it like this: You would not know that she was a vegetarian until you actually sat down to eat something with her. And back in those days, it wasn't a cool thing to be a vegetarian or anything like that, anyway. No one inspired her to do it. It wasn't her world view or anything. She just didn't eat meat.

In recent years I have become a sort of half vegetarian myself. I still eat meat, but only if I know for certain that the meat comes from a creature that was not factory farmed. That lived a normal animal life out in the meadow, or scratching around in real dirt, or swimming in free flowing water, or whatever. And it isn't just meat - I also do not eat factory farmed dairy products or eggs, only free range stuff. Which, thankfully, here in Turkey is still available, although far more expensive, of course.

Anyway, back to those olden golden days. I am not particularly nostalgic. The future has always interested me far more than the past. But, I do have to say that "those were the days". The fun we had. The cameraderie. And how carefree we were. How self assured. But all that I only realize now, looking back. The carefreeness and the self assurance. Back then, of course, we fretted endlessly about this that and the other. Made endless mountains out of what I now can see very clearly were nothing but molehills. At least in my case, that is what they were. The joys of an inexperienced youth. Jeez...

Munching on our Greek Diner deligths, puffing on our cigarettes. Man - those really were the days!


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