Silence of the lamb

We had a busy weekend: Sam's second birthday party, a trip to the farmers' market, a visit to the railroad museum, but I'll get to all of that later. What I need to tell you right now concerns the cookout we didn't go to. And, as will become apparent, I'm using the word cookout in a literal, if ancient, sense.

On Saturday night, at around 9:30 pm, I heard a knock at the door. It was our next door neighbors. All of them. Ok, just three of the five family members. But they do tend to travel in twos and threes. This is probably because the parents speak very little English and rely on the kids to translate. So the middle son, "A" (older brother to N) tells me his father wants to invite us to their house tomorrow for a cookout. Since my parents were still in town, I told him we'd try to make it but that we had plans to visit Annapolis.

This was true enough and left us an option if we needed it. [Full disclosure: our neighbors are wonderful people, and their friends are all really nice. That said, going to events at their house can be difficult as most of the guests speak very little English, and we don't speak any Bosnian.]

In any event, the next day N came by to invite Vicki to come see what his mom was cooking in their yard.

It was a lamb. Not leg of lamb. Not one of those inscrutable cylinders they carve gyros off of. But lamb.

A whole one, slow-roasting over a bed of open coals in much the same way I imagine Abraham's sacrifice was prepared.

How do I know? Because Samson and I went over and checked it out. Surprisingly, he kept his own counsel on the matter, but he does count La-La among his dearest friends and was probably just trying to play it cool. Or not be traumatized by the spinning animal carcass slowly cooking in front of him.

In any event, we ended up skipping Annapolis in favor of the train museum and dinner out at an Italian place. By the time we got home, it looked like things were all over next door. Which was probably for the best. I don't think Vicki (or my parents) could have stomached the whole thing. Literally.

Of course we didn't get away totally clean. Later that night there was a knock at the door, and two of our neighbors were there with a plate of lamb they'd saved for us. Did I mention our neighbors are wonderful people?

It wasn't fresh off the spit, but it was actually pretty good.