Growing Up Getting El Pan

I spent Friday night talking to an old friend and a new friend at Barfly's while sipping on Lone Star for most of the night. My old friend, Nelson, is also from the Valley. A., the new friend, is from San Diego, Califas, not San Diego, Texas (she laughed when I asked her to clarify).

The conversation led to growing up. The three of us grew up pretty poor. I thought it was funny when Nelson said that he and A. were "bastard children." A. agreed. Then he called her White Trash and she took exception. I laughed. Then they both laughed.

We swapped stories and I was reminded of summers in El Campito. Summertime was great. All of the kids in the barrio would come outside as early as possible to play marbles, baseball, stick ball, or any game we could invent, like Bote Sonado. For a couple of weeks in the summer, the Butter Krust company, would drop old, but edible bread at the office. Remember, I lived in Section 8 housing, so we had a main office, maintenance workers, a barrio police dude, etc. Every day, we would wake up and start playing, with no care in the world, but always making to be on the lookout for the bread truck approaching. The truck would drop off 50 to 100 loaves of different kinds of bread to be distributed among the residents of El Campito. The kids were usually the ones intstructed to go snag the bread - only two per kid. Man, that was fun. After we each got our loaves of bread, we would all compare. "hey, yo tengo este bread, you wanna trade." Then, of course we'd go on our way, drop off the bread, have lunch, and be back outside about 30 minutes later to resume our playing.

I'm not sure why I thought of that, but those times were pretty fun.