I saw a video of a young girl trying oysters for the first time; she was not impressed. I laughed at her expressions as she was encouraged to try it without being able to swallow it. This jogged a memory of the first time I ate oysters.

It was 1976 during my first trip to El Salvador. There I met a man, Pedro, who owned the local gas station in Usualtan. He needed to go to the coast on a business trip and invited me along.
The drive to the coast was beautiful. Pedro did his best telling me about his country with his poor English and I tried to talk back with my poor Spanish. It was quite the conversation. That evening we stopped at a restaurant on the beach for supper. Not so much a restaurant as a hut with a few tables and chairs sitting on the sand.

He ordered oysters and soft boiled turtle eggs for us with supper. I grew up on beans and cornbread and didn’t even know oysters were considered a food. My face probably looked about the same as that little girl that couldn’t swallow her oyster.

But before I went to El Salvador I’d decided that whatever food was offered I was going to eat it. As I watched him pour the oysters straight from the shell into his mouth I regretted that commitment. Yet, I swallowed mine the same way.

He washed his down with a beer; I washed mine down with an orange Fanta.

I don’t know if it was the seafood, or if I caught a bug, but the next morning I woke up to a nasty upset stomach. By the time my co-traveler arrived on our borrowed motorcycle I was not feeling the least bit well. He wanted to spend the morning driving up the beach, and asked me if I thought I could make it. I told him yes.

Seldom have I ever been more wrong. We spent the morning frequently stopping the motorcycle so I could dig holes in the sand and purge my body.

It was a long time before I could ever look at oysters again, let alone eat one.

When I got back home, beans and cornbread never looked so good.

The Bearings | Charlotte and I hadn’t been together all that long when I asked if she’d pick up a car part for me. At the time I was doing a lot of my own car repairs, but it was sometimes hard to get to the parts store around my work schedule.

She didn’t really want to go to the parts store for me. She didn’t know a lot about cars,and at the time few women worked in parts stores and few visited them. It was a man’s domain.

I told her I would give her very exact instructions as to what was needed so she shouldn’t have any problems. It took a bit of presauding but she finally agreed.

We didn’t have cell phones back in those days so I had to wait until I got off work to find out how it went.

She wasn’t all that happy at me when she told me what had happened.

She walked up to the counter and told the salesperson exactly what I’d told her.

“I need a set of muffler bearings, the gold ones, not the silver ones.”

Yep.

I’d set her up.

The salesman laughed and told her someone was pulling her leg, there was no such thing as muffler bearings, gold or silver.

There is a moral to this story. If you ever want your spouse to pick up car parts for you ever again don’t send them into the parts store to buy muffler bearings.

Blinker fluid I’m sure that would be fine, but not muffler bearings.