I have never understood men’s fascination with bacon. Where I live it is an obsession with some. So much so, that we have a bacon fest each year. Restaurants gather and make some of the most, in my opinion, obnoxious combinations of foods with bacon. Who would want to ruin chocolate mixing it with bacon?

We all have family members that embarrass us from time to time. I have a family member that makes it his life calling to be embarrassing in public. This past mother’s day, I took my aunt, my cousin (her son) and his girlfriend for a nice Sunday brunch buffet/cruise on a local paddle wheel riverboat. There is a massive crowd that day and it takes us an hour just to get our tickets and on the boat. My cousin is in one of his “moods.” We sit down and he proclaims loudly. “I am not hungry!” He sits at the table watching the three of us eat grumbling and mumbling under his breath about this thing or that.

As the buffet winds down and most of the guest head out to the deck, the kitchen crew comes to clear off the buffet table. In steps my cousin. He walks up to the serving table as the servers are begging to put away the remains of the buffet and blurts out, “Gimme that bacon!”, and proceeds to fill a plate with bacon. He piles it at least six inches high. There has to be a good pound or two of bacon on his plate; nothing else. He comes back to the table and sits down to “munch.” The waiters begin to remove the plates from the table. There is alarmed look in my cousin’s eyes. Someone is going to take his bacon. There will be none of that! He loudly blurts out, “Don’t touch my bacon! Don’t anyone dare touch my bacon! It’s my bacon!” By now the entire ship knows it is his bacon.

Me? I just want to crawl into a hole and hide.