It's the Great Potato, Charlie Brown!

The front of my office consists almost entirely of glass squares, so it is like working in a phone booth.

I'm sitting at my desk typing away on my laptop and I happen to glance up.

Typically the cubicle in front of me is unoccupied, since the tenant relocated to a southern state and works from home. She is required to make an appearance once a month, so sometimes she'll appear - tan and miserable to leave her home and nice weather and come to NJ where inhospitable weather always seems to suggest that she made the right choice.

I glanced up and there she was, leaning forward into her deep black handbag. I watched idly, as she rummaged through determinedly. With a sigh, she sunk back into her chair, withdrawing her hand and clutching what looked like a giant, lumpy, brown rock. I watched with interest as she brought the dome shaped tip to her mouth and bit it off without a wince. Bright orange flesh appeared and I realized she was chewing hurriedly on a large, whole yam.

I would expect this kind of treatment of a pear, a peach, an apple. A tomato would be a stretch, but I could handle it. This, though. This was something.

A coworker happened by and remarked that she might want to heat it up to which she replied that she had cooked it that morning in the microwave in her hotel room and she liked it room temperature and was finding it delicious.

She joined me at lunch although she'd long since finished the tuber. I asked her if she was dieting and she admitted that she was trying to lower her cholesterol. I didn't press the issue, because she seemed to be very nonchalant about eating a large, whole, unbuttered, unquartered, unbrown-sugared big, honking sweet potato.

She chased the potato with some Halloween candy later in the afternoon.

She's gone home, but I'm left wondering about what other vegetables she's mistreating back home where the weather is nicer and hopefully, the people more forgiving. Me, I'm still thinking, "It's freaking weird to take a whole, cooked sweet potato out of your purse and just start gnawing on it."