As I was sit­ting in the deli café the other day, wait­ing for my order to arrive, I casu­ally glanced at my sur­round­ings, breath­ing in the details. To my right a cou­ple sat qui­etly munch­ing on their Buf­falo turkey wraps car­ry­ing on a con­ver­sa­tion in whis­per. The wait­ress, a patient young woman who looked to be in her mid-20s silently wiped the front counter clean, and then she smiled faintly and retreated to the kitchen.

Towards the front of the store my eyes care­fully scanned each cus­tomer as they entered the deli. It’s in this moment that I reflect about the appear­ances of human beings. It’s true that as humans we all come in dif­fer­ent shapes and sizes, much like any­thing – like fruit for instance. Today I saw all sorts of apples, oranges, bananas and toma­toes – those peo­ple who pass as both a fruit and a vegetable.

For a moment I looked away for cer­tain that my food was on its way and nat­u­rally this being a casual ser­vice deli it wasn’t. When I looked towards the front of the store again I noticed that unbe­knownst to me Fidel Cas­tro had entered the build­ing and was pay­ing for his Dr. Pep­per. In that moment I thought, “Would Fidel actu­ally drink Dr. Pep­per or would he pre­fer Coca-Cola or a Pepsi?” (Mike thinks he’d drink Iron­beer). Despite my pon­der­ings, there he was, Fidel Cas­tro, at the Big Mini Mart in Rochester, New York.