Yes, I know I said I was on break, but I got this one in ahead of time, and asked the friendly robot to release it today.
Happy New Year! Please be safe, happy, and healthy.
One of my football friends and I took a wide-body charter jet along with over 300 other fans to the New Year’s Day Sugar Bowl college football game in New Orleans, to be played around 5pm on New Year’s afternoon. It was an early morning flight, just a few hours after Happy New Year!, returning home directly as soon as the game was over.
As we rode in our charter bus from the airport to the French Quarter, we wondered about meeting another friend who had driven here for the game.
“I guess we’ll call Manny’s cell when we get there?”
“Yeah, or maybe we’ll run into him somewhere.”
Looking out the bus window, I was surprised to see how many people were out in the streets already before noon, right after partying late on New Year’s Eve. It certainly seemed that all the football fans were out already because the streets were teeming with those dressed in their team colors, and the place was already packed. But then again, there were thousands of fans who had come into town for the game, on top of the thousands who had descended here for the New Year celebration itself.
The bus disgorged us in front of a hotel on Canal Street, one block from the intersection with Bourbon Street. We merged into the meandering crowds, walking towards Bourbon. As we rounded the corner to Bourbon St., I literally bumped face-to-face into someone coming around the corner in the opposite direction. It was our friend Manny.
Anyone Got a Toothpick?
I was camping with an Outing Club on the islands of Lake George, New York. I had been caving (spelunking) and more with them, but this was my first of several camping trips with the club. It was Columbus Day weekend, and the islands were officially closed, but the state parks people would open the islands exclusively for this looooong-standing tradition of the region’s outing clubs all converging on these islands for the long weekend. This was a tradition started many years before any parks department had wrestled control of the islands, so yeah, we were grandfathered in.
After our traditional Saturday night steak dinner, cooked on a thick slab of cast iron above an open-pit fire, I was sitting in a friend’s tent. We were in the middle of the woods, surrounded at a distance by dozens of other tents and a couple of hundred campers. I had a piece of steak stuck in my teeth, and in being a smart ass joking with my friends in the tent, I yelled out, “Anyone got a toothpick?”
To our amazement, a voice answered through the woods, “Yeah! Hold on!”
A couple of campers had been passing by about twenty feet from our tent. They walked over, and one of them produced a waterproof stainless-steel gizmo hanging around his neck. He unscrewed it and offered me one of his assortment of bone-dry toothpicks.
“I never go camping without them!”
“Thanks, I was only joking around, but here you were! I bet, though, that in about half an hour, I wouldn’t have been joking and really pissed about that steak stuck in there.”
The toothpick did the job, and I didn’t even need one the next morning when we cooked the leftover steaks on the cast-iron slab, along with fried eggs.