When Mexican tuna is getting you down, and you want your lunch crafted by an artist - really, an artisan - there is just one place to go…where the cookies are always Otis Spunklemeyer and salt is dispensed from a little tin sifter. Call it a sub, a hoagie, a grinder, or a sangwich, you´ve got a friend at Subway, waiting with patience and plastic-gloved hands for you to choose your bread, its length, meats & cheese, vegetable-ish toppings, and condiments.

My lifetime experience of the Connecticut-based chain is that every possible combination manifests the same flavor - salty, tangy, yeasty, onion-y - thus proving that a Subway sandwich is more than the sum of its parts. A theory informed by new physics posits that each observer is unique, his experience subjective, ergo, unable to be completely expressed/understood by the other. So that each person must face his own Subway, all alone.

I believe that the very special bread warmer - you know the multi-racked sweetheart I´m referring to - is actually a time machine. And the very special bread loaves are altered at a molecular level. The very act of eating , first olfactory, then tactile, then an instantaneous comunication between one´s mouth and brain, is an elaborate illusion - a trick being played on our senses and memory that delivers the past to the present and vice versa.

Savoring a pequeña, pan integral, pechuga de palvo, con queso y todos los vegetales, sal y pimiento is a deeply conscious journey to my childhood, when my mother and I would stop at the Subway storefront in the Finast grocery plaza and order lunch to go which we would enjoy later while watching the small dark waves of the Sound. An altogether simpler time, before death and the heinous invention of toasting, were those sandwich days.