A foreign country

someone at work brought to lunch today this variant of a pork dish stewed in a bed of tough and leathery beans rife in the central part of the old country. the office reeked of my impecunious childhood. i took a full hour for my lunch break and walked to the nearest greasy spoon. the past, so wrote a now obscure british novelist, is a foreign country. they do things differently there but in the grey of a rain soaked bronx this afternoon, it sure felt long and arduously familiar.