A few years ago, when my brother Aaron was still in the Coast Guard, I drove with him to his new post in Seattle from San Francisco. During our drive through Oregon he introduced me to the art of sunflower seed eating. The basic idea, he said, was that you jam a bunch in one side of your cheek, getting them nice and soft with your saliva and then you crack 'em open with your teeth on the other side to get to the itty bitty meaty center. What to do with the shell? Well, you just spit them out the window of course!
He advised me that the best thing to do would be to start with a small amount and then work my way up to more. So I took a few and popped them in my mouth. However, my impatience resulted in lots of tiny shards of sunflower shells in my mouth. After a few attempts, I finally got the hang of it and started spitting the shells out the window. Little did I know that the wind was flying them right back inside the van and hitting Aaron in the head. So here I am enjoying myself and having a grand old time and he's covered in spit shells. You would think he would have said something. But being somewhat of a stoic and overall zen kind of guy, he just grinned and bore it. Well, "grin" maybe is not the right word. By the time I turned to him to say, "Hey aren't I so cool?" he was covered in shells. They were in his shirt, his hair, stuck to his face and all over the seat. When I asked him why he didn't say anything, he replied, "I don't know."
Yes, that's my brother.
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