But there's a lull around lunchtime, and Mrs. Clayton asks me to check on some orders while I'm sitting behind the counter at the register discreetly eating my bagel.
He was living in a volcanic field on Santa Cruz island 500 miles off the coast of Ecuador, where you couldn't find a decent bagel if you tried: in fact, a place a lot like Washington.
There were two more members there that morning: Daniel Stein and Richard Gottfried; they were in the kitchen, making sure the lox, cream cheese, bagels and eggs were ready for the next day's breakfast.
So imagine you're slicing a nice garlic-cheese bagel one morning, and you lacerate the distal phalanx of your pollex — in other words, you cut the tip of your thumb.