His Dogness

Some years ago, there was a group of us at work that routinely went to lunch together. A particularly entertaining member of the group was a woman named Karen.

Pick a topic – any topic – stick with it long enough and she would reveal some habit, opinion or quick that was unique to her universe. One day, the topic at hand was personal food idiosyncrasies, such as buttering the bread before applying peanut butter. Oh, no, no, she said, she had no unusual food preferences.

A few minutes later, she said, “Well, I do like to eat Crisco with sugar.”

Yes!

Although we all freely admitted that the filling of such sandwich cookies as Oreos is probably the equivalent of Crisco and sugar, it had crossed no one else’s mind to re-create the filling in our kitchens at home.

Karen was quite fastidious. Letting her fingers touch a sugar dispenser that had been touched by Who Knows Who? was out of the question. Before picking up one, she would take a fresh paper napkin and wrap it around the dispenser so that her fingers touched the napkin rather than the glass.

One day, a half dozen of us were eating lunch at a cafeteria up by the airport. Karen was eating her macaroni-and-cheese when her fork hit something. She cleared away the macaroni-and-cheese to reveal a stainless-steel bolt perhaps two inches long.

The rest of us were aghast. Finding a bolt in your macaroni-and-cheese would disturb anyone. But Karen finding a bolt in her macaroni and cheese… Although no one said anything, I’m sure we were all wondering whether she was going to explode.

Not at all. She took her plate to the cashier. The cashier was suitably apologetic and offered to refund Karen’s money. No, no need. Free dessert? No, thank you.

Karen was fine. Clearly, I had not been thinking of her in quite the right way.

A few minutes later, a man wearing the kind of white jacket that men who work in kitchens sometimes wear came up to our table.

He had the parts of an electric, stainless-steel cheese grater in his hands and a story to tell. One of his jobs was to grate all the cheese for the macaroni-and-cheese. A couple of days ago, the bolt that held together the machine had disappeared. Ever since, he had been grating all the cheese by hand.

This was a busy cafeteria, and macaroni-and-cheese was a popular item. Losing that bolt would have been a disaster.

The bolt that Karen had found was the lost bolt, the man said. He had come out to thank her personally. He was so excited that he had brought along the machine so that he could also show her just how the fit in and held everything together.

It’s not every day that you can make someone that happy. That day was Karen’s.