Poofy's Pastrami

Let me tell you a story about something that happened in my childhood that I still think is funny and relevant.

The story is about something called "Poofy's Pastrami". It was a restaurant, and while I never ate there, it was a familiar part of my childhood because I passed it on the way from school to my grandparents' house. A lot of the time, my mum would pick me up from school and take me to my grandparents' house (which was fairly nearby), and the route we took would take us by a construction site.

They were building (or attempting to build) what was most likely a restaurant called Poofy's Pastrami, and we could deduce this from the presence of a large billboard-like sign advertising such an establishment. The part of the sign we found funniest was a cartoon drawing of a black man holding a pastrami sandwich and looking very pleased about it. Undoubtedly he was Poofy, and he was showing the world his pastrami and how wonderful it was and how they should all come to eat at the fine establishment his workers were busy building.

The odd thing about Poofy's Pastrami was that it always seemed to be under construction. They were always  building the place, but it never seemed to get built. There is something inherently funny about a restaurant with a silly name and a silly billboard that seems to be under permanent construction. My mother and I recognized the humor in this, and we would react accordingly when passing it. She would say something like, "There's Poofy," and I'd say, "And we still can't have his pastrami." (Not that we intended to go there upon its completion. Neither of us much cared for pastrami, though we definitely liked making fun of it.)

A curious thing happened, however. After about a year of construction, Poofy's Pastrami vanished. Gone was the construction site. Gone was the billboard with the restaurant's name. Gone was the man who gave the restaurant its name. There was nothing to suggest that Poofy's Pastrami had ever existed.

My mother and I didn't find this mysterious or odd - after all, this happens all the time, restaurants being under construction for a year and ultimately never happening - and we incorporated it into our humor. She'd say, "Goodbye, Poofy," and I'd say, "We never got to have his pastrami." Poofy's Pastrami was a thing that was and then just as soon was not.

Things like Poofy's Pastrami are far more common than anyone would like to admit. Things are planned and started but never finished. They take a long time and turn out to be colossal failures in that they attract people's attention and even become the source of jokes, but they don't happen. The restaurant never happens. People are left with the memory of a pastrami place that never was, even though it tried to be. Things are planned and do not happen and everyone remembers, at least in the back of their minds, the thing that never was but tried to be.

But there is a bright side to this fact of failure. Sometimes, under a different set of circumstances, in a different place with different people, they are attempted, and they are accomplished. I looked up "Poofy's Pastrami" online, just for curiosity's sake, and I found out that there are operating establishments under that name and with the sign depicting the African American Poofy with his pastrami (looking pleased as ever). Somewhere in this world, a Poofy's Pastrami was built and succeeded.

Ultimately, the story of Poofy's Pastrami gives us hope that, even if things fail under a certain set of circumstances, they can be tried again under different ones and succeed, and even the failures can give people a much-needed laugh.