Thank You, Whoever You Are

The four of us were at the Chinese restaurant to celebrate the official anniversary of this column. Me, the unlikely writer. The middle-school dropout.

One decade ago, I posted a humorous story online and thus began a journey that would change my life.

So anyway, it was a small dinner party. Our waiter was a cheerful guy with an exoticly foreign accent. He was originally from—this is why I love Asian restaurants—Mexico.

We knew this because he could not pronounce the Chinese dishes, such as “zhá jiàng miàn,” and “zìchuān huǒguō.”

He had an even harder time understanding English words. For example, I ordered a tea, but he brought me a Pabst Blue Ribbon.

“I ordered a tea,” I pointed out.

“I’m sorry, señor,” he said, “I will take your beer back.”

“Let’s not react in haste,” said I.

We had spring rolls. We ate Krab® rangoon. Egg drop soup. And when it came to the calamari, we were enjoying our appetizer when my cousin informed the table that this might not be actual calamari.

“What do you mean?” we said.

My cousin went on to tell a story. He knew a guy who used to inspect meat processing plants for a state agency. One day, the man was at a farm and he saw several boxes stacked and labeled “artificial calamari.”

“What is artificial calamari?” he asked the manager.

“Hog rectums,” the manager replied.

We all stopped eating mid-bite.

Everyone at the table stared at the plate of puckered calamari. Whereupon my wife brought out her phone and started Googling the validity of the claims.

Come to find out, there is such a thing as my cousin’s unsavory theory. However, it would be illegal in the U.S. to serve pork parts and call them “calamari.” Moreover, the USDA reports they’ve never heard of anyone trying to pass pork parts as squid.

So before you send me three metric tons of hate mail, let me state, for the record: If the menu calls it “calamari,” it’s calamari. Your local restaurant owner would NEVER lie to you just to make a buck. This is America. Nobody lies.

“It’s really not a big deal,” my cousin went on. “If you’ve ever eaten a hotdog or a sausage made in America, chances are you’ve eaten thousands of pork rectums.”

“I think I’ll just have a salad,” I said.

So anyway, the reason I am writing this is because when our meal was finished, the waiter brought out four fortune cookies for the table. We all took turns reading.

My wife’s fortune read: “A new romance is in your future.”

She looked at me and said, “You’re walking home tonight.”

Someone else’s read: “To truly find yourself, you must play hide and seek alone.”

My cousin’s fortune read, “That wasn’t chicken.”

Then I opened my cookie. The words touched me. My fortune read: “This week you will find new ways to say ‘thank you.” So I came home and wrote this.

Thank you. You’ll never know how much you mean to me. Whoever you are.

No hogs were harmed during the making of this column.