Completely unrelated photo of my daughter

During a business meeting this morning, the smell of bacon, smoky, rich, and alluring, began wafting into our conference room, making my stomach growl almost as loud as my voice. In my haste to leave this morning, I missed breakfast and had to settle for the one emergency pop-tart in my desk drawer, which held me over for about ten minutes. I decided to soothe the bacon jones by trying out the deli directly below our building, a Baltimore landmark called Werner’s, to see if they could satisfy my need for breakfast food.

I ordered a bacon, egg, and cheese on a toasted bagel with a side of hashbrowns. What I got was a drippy egg and cheese with burnt bacon on a cold cinnamon-raisin bagel. The hashbrowns were delivered as a styrofoam tub of soggy potato circles which had once been waved over a grill and then placed under a heat lamp.

Anyone who knows me understands the seething contempt I have for raisins hidden in baked goods, but because I’d paid for this grand feast, I had to eat it, so I did. And now I feel as though I consumed a plate of toxic waste braised in week-old cooking oil.