Chew Your Food

Thinking back a few years, i was at a business meeting in Jacksonville, Florida.  I was talking up a storm to everyone trying to get more  business.  A lot of talking was done at the bar and between the bar and buffet.
 The buffet was  pretty good, as far as buffets go.  I'm not a big fan but these were dishes served by people, so no dirty hands, or feet for that matter were going into the food.  They had  steak shish-kebabs, spaghetti, shrimp, chicken on skewers, etc etc.  There I was  talking and talking eating my kebabs,  suckin' down my spaghetti. As i'm talking my voice changes and  it's harder to  push out the words.  It gets even more difficult but I keep on giving my sales pitch to a couple of guys.  My big eating problem has always been , I don't chew. Not a good thing.  I look at the plate and do not notice the 5 inch stick from the shish-kebab on my plate.  I think "holy shish-kebab sticks!"  I sucked the damn stick down with the spaghetti.  One of the guys I was talking to said , you better get to a hospital. So, i'm waiting  in the lobby,and  trying to talk to this young woman there, who it turn out was the granddaughter of the best Lemon Ices in East New York. What a small world. She was  Willy's granddaughter from Willy's Ices on Atlantic Avenue, right near the White Castle.  I was amazed. She was even more amazed, 1) that I knew of Willy's Ices 2) that i swallowed a  5 inch shish-kebab stick and  am  still talking
   So I get to an Emergency Medical Trailer, they take an x ray, and they tell me, They can't believe I actually swallowed that. I told them it slid down like stiff spaghetti.  They told me  if i'm in severe pain to come back right away.  As it turned out, I wasn't in severe pain, and about  3 days later, I called my whole family in to  see the sight of a big ol' shish-kebab stick floating in my toilet bowl.
      From then on I chewed my food. And it is a good thing I did, because  a week later, I was playing golf, and went to eat at the  restaurant at the golf course. I ordered a triple decker sandwich that is held together by toothpicks. Wouldnt ya know it? I'm eating and chewing , and i bite into something hard. It's a toothpick.  Apparently when the chef stuck the toothpick in( the ones with the colored frizzly stuff on the end)  it broke off so you couldn't see it. So what does he do, he doesn't remove the broken one and just sticks another one in.  So it's a good thing I started chewing.  Scarey stuff.