I once quit a job because I did not make my sandwich right.

I had a job landscaping. It was pleasant, easy work. I got out in the weather, saw much of my town, got exercise. The guys I worked with, and the boss I worked for, were “good eggs” and I got along with them. I admired the foreman’s pride in his work, and it rubbed off on me.

But one day, I got so scared that I just called in and made up a story of “how I got in trouble and can’t make it in.” I called later in the day to quit. I was just scared. And I did not really know, nor dwelled upon, why.

But a memory, it was right before I quit, had always been nagging at me about that job. It is, as in the pride in the foreman’s work, so clear. It was lunch time — we always stopped at noon for about a half hour, no matter what — and I found myself looking down at my ill-prepared lunch of some dry and hard french bread with just a couple of slices of roast beef in the middle and some snack to go with it that was so insignificant that I do not remember what it was.

I remember, sitting comfortably on a porch, they guys all eating their lunches of carefully made sandwiches and fruit and drinks; someone had milk. They had all done this before, in fact for a very long time, and they seemed so comfortable with what they were doing… they seemed content.

And I remember looking down at my dry, hastily thrown together sandwich and felt — knew — that I was not one of them. I was different. I did not belong. I was not part of them. I could not even make a sandwich right.

Only now do I realize that…

The sandwich was why I could not go back.