Lunch Time

One of the biggest shocks of my leaving education and completely switching careers wasn’t the risk. It was the person taking the risk.

Habit, predictability, routine. These are all words used to describe me. Somehow, these patterns of behavior have become one of my most pronounced character traits.

I would like to base this on all of my scholarly reading on education, which relentlessly comes back to the need for children to have structure and routine in order to feel safe, enabling them to learn to their maximum potential.

In reality, these were built in character traits, which made me a good educator.

The predictability flows right down to my eating habits. I eat chicken everyday for lunch. Boneless, skinless, chicken breasts. On the road though, I cannot always cook my own chicken; not all hotels have a kitchenette.

Since I was staying in one such hotel, I was forced to be flexible. I stopped by a local Walmart and picked-up a rotisserie chicken. Costco’s rotisserie chickens are my preferred brand - they are larger and less expensive - but I did not have the patience to drive an extra 30-minutes for a little extra chicken meat.

These ready-to-serve birds are easy to break-up and put into a ziplock bag for lunch. I stuck to stripping the skin, eating the breast for lunch, and treating myself to the dark meat for dinner.

Sides on the road? Baby carrots for lunch and canned veggies for dinner. Thank goodness for the peel-back cans of vegetables. I am fairly certain TSA frowns upon flying with a can opener these days.

Most of the time, I do not get too hungry during the day, but today was one of those days the hunger seemed relentless. By 11:00 a.m. I was reaching for some baby carrots to hold me over. By 1:00 p.m., it was bye-bye birdie.

Alone in my car, I do not have to worry about common courtesy, or manners, the way I have to when eating in public. I am in my own little bubble. It is just me. I can dive into my food however I want. Sure, the car has windows, but I will never have to speak to those people.

Most of the time, I reach into the ziploc bag and break off pieces of chicken in manageable, bite-size chunks, calmly eating as I drive to my next appointment.

Not today.

Today, I was voracious. The chicken was my enemy, and I meant to put it in its place - my belly.

I tore open the bag, pushed the chicken to the top, past the edge of the bag, like a meat push-pop, and bit off almost half of it at once. I went after it as though it was a gigantic turkey leg from one of those street vendors at festivals. I was more than happy to chew and savor it for however long necessary to get it down.

At this precise moment of sweet reward, when the food finally hit my lips, teeth, and tongue, something terrible happened.

I was overwhelmed by a sour scent and, simultaneously, an extremely sour taste. This chicken, which I bought just two days prior, had turned hard and fast to rotten.

It’s 95 degrees outside, I am driving with my windows up and the air conditioning blasting. One hand is on the steering wheel. The other proudly touts remains of my chicken-bag-push-pop, now turned sour.

I wanted to spit this out immediately, rid myself of this worse-than-sour-milk flavor rapidly spreading across every taste bud in my mouth. My eyes were watering, and I instinctively turned toward my window, just barely stopping myself in time before splattering it up against the inside of my rental car.

There was nowhere to go. Slowly, or at least what felt very slowly, my panicked brain realized I had a bag in my hand. I let the unscathed piece of chicken slide to the bottom and added back the bite that should never have been