Stale Bread and Liver Cancer

I have a friend in The Program who drives a truck for a fancy local bakery, delivering bread and rolls to area grocery stores.  I bumped into him this morning as I was migrating from a meeting to the pool when he pulled in.  We chatted pleasantly for a few minutes - he was pretty sure he had liver cancer, a worst case scenario diagnosis that I can SO identify with - when he said: "Hey, do you want some free bread?  It's day old stuff that we can't sell to the stores."

He works for a good bakery.  And I'm cheap enough that he could have substituted "baby rattlesnakes" or "spent uranium fuel rods" for bread and I still would have grabbed a few bags, sight unseen, and just sorted it out when I got home.  Free is free, even if it's something I don't want.  I might need it in the future when I get liver cancer and SuperK leaves me and I die alone, on the streets, in pain and misery.

I digress.  When we got to his truck he handed out bags of designer bread that probably cost 5 or 6 bucks a pop.

"Are you sure this is OK?" I asked, clutching the bags to my chest in a way that demonstrated he would have to use deadly force to get them back.

"Oh, yeah," he said.  "We drop it off at shelters or the food bank."
"Don't worry about it," he added, seeing my stricken look.  "There's more here than they can use."

I thought about giving one bag back but decided against it, figuring the world would judge me by my intentions and not by actions.  Actually, I pondered grabbing a 4th bag but realized that would start me down a slippery slope that might lead to a whole trunk full of stale bread, then armed robbery of the whole #$!! truck.  Luckily, I had forgotten to bring my ski mask.

After my swim I pulled into the coffee shop parking lot.  My street roots guy was out front.  I looked at my three bags of free bread and set aside what I thought was the most tastiest of the loaves, then took the remaining two bags and headed over to where he was standing.

"Sure," he said, when I offered one of them to him.  "Do you have anything with olives in it?"

What is with the people at this coffee shop?  Triple mochas and roast beef sandwiches and olive-studded bread?  They make bread with olives in it?

"I'll take the big one," he said, smiling brightly, grabbing the larger of the two loaves, probably cursing the lack of olives.

You know, it actually irritated me for a minute, the formerly homeless guy taking the larger of the two bags of stale bread that had been given to me for free.

I'm working on it but I have a long journey ahead of me.