Rocky Recovery

I’ve always had a weakness for burritos. Bean and cheese. Beef and bean. Crisp. Soft. With chiles or without. After a long day subbing, I had a hankering for a simple, good-tasting, tortilla-enclosed mouthful of burrito yumminess. There weren’t many choices at the store, so I purchased a package of eight put out by a reputable company—Reser’s. Baja Café Beaf and Bean.  I was already envisioning two steaming bundles of savory, somewhat spicy beef and bean beauteousness with a side of taco sauce and sour cream.

Thank God for microwaves. Within minutes, I was ready to sink my teeth into those babies. Masterpieces of processed fast food fodder that I knew I would thoroughly enjoy. Anxiously throwing caution to the winds, I plunged the side of my fork into the malleable, tortilla-swaddled delicacy.

The first bite was heavenly. The second bite was delightful. By the third bite, I became a little sad that it was disappearing so quickly. So I made an intentional effort to savor the next bite—the flavor, the texture…the…the texture! What in the world had I just detected? It was somewhat cushioned by pieces of tortilla, but between my teeth I could easily distinguish something solid—as in rigid and inflexible. A piece of bone? An uncooked bean?

With a furrowed brow I extracted the item from my mouth, grateful that I hadn’t broken any teeth. It was clearly a small, brownish, relatively triangular rock. This burrito possessed a “boulder” consistency for sure. My brush with reparative dental work was over. But what to do in this moment of stunned surprise?

I cautiously finished my burrito and decided my new motto would be “Dodge a rock, don’t expect a quarry.” One small rock in one out of eight burritos ended up in my dinner. It could’ve happened to anyone, I suppose. It won’t cause me to stop eating burritos, just as multiple falls off a bike doesn’t cause a determined child to permanently flip down the kickstand. There’s risk in everything we do—it doesn’t mean the worst will happen. It may, however, mean that we sometimes need to chew softly.