Last night as I was lying in bed I was thinking about the best sandwich I ever ate.

It was sometime in Autumn: the air was chilly and I was in Middle School. It was recycling day; this is back when recycling was just starting out. In Brown Deer groups would volunteer to pick up the paper recycling. My youth group, from Brown Deer United Methodist church, had this particular day. The kids piled into a big truck that had wooden slats. Each house had tied up their papers in tidy cubes and had piled them next to their mailboxes. The truck slowly drove around the neighborhood, and at each house some of the kids would hop out of the back of the truck and toss the papers up to us, and we’d arrange them. It was fun, hard, chattery work. By the time we were done we were starving.

We stopped in the “old Brown Deer” section and piled out of the truck. Mom gave me some money and a bunch of us went to Kurt Schultz Deli. I ordered a roast beef sandwich. The thinly sliced roast beef was buttery and pink. The kaiser roll was thick with a layer of butter. I bit into it and it was the finest thing I had ever tasted. The crisp air and hard work had sharpened my hunger, which only increased the pleasure of that first bite. My eyes practically crossed. I had never had real deli before, and beef was a treat. It was so simple, so perfect. I have tried many roast beef sandwiches since that day, but nothing has matched it.