It was Tuesday when I cut my hand on a piece of bread.

This tragedy requires a bit of backstory.

I bought the bread, a $1.49 grocery store baguette, on Sunday morning.

Big Man, who still refuses to eat middle school cafeteria lunches, asked for roast beef for his sandwiches this week. I don’t like paying roast beef prices, but it’s the start of the school year, and maybe this little luxury will help him let go the utopia of summer and ease back into the drudgery of school.

Next week, when summer is a distant memory, we downgrade to ham.

The sliced roast beef looked exceptionally good, lean and red (a rarity in our town). Maybe I too would like a sandwich for some near future lunch.

The kids are happy eating the preservative-doused sliced bread, but if I’ve got to take out a second mortgage to pay for the meat, my sandwich should be on bread with enough dignity to die young.

I picked out a baguette; little did I know, it didn’t want to die alone.

Bread of character, even third-rate, store brand, character, should be eaten in one day. That didn’t happen.

On Monday, Big Man chose to have his sandwich on a hunk of baguette. I didn’t have a chance to make my sandwich. This was my undoing.

On Tuesday, half the baguette remained. I tried to get the boy take it again. “No,” he said. “That bread’s too hard.” I didn’t see the warning in his wise words.

At lunchtime, I cut off a hunk of the aging bread for my sandwich. The previously cut end was too hard to possibly enjoy. I must cut a bit off that end. Though my knife seemed sharp, it struggled through the crust.

I needed more leverage. Leverage is key with baguettes.

This is why I picked the bread off the plate and held it tight in my left hand as I sawed at the end with my right. Finally, I was cutting through it.

And then calamity struck.

The bit at the end gave way. The long piece I was holding in my left hand crashed into the side of my right hand. That’s when I learned that I had not cut off enough. A still hard, and now sharp, edge of crust dug into the skin of my right hand, leaving a splinter of crumb under the layers of scraped skin.

Don’t mock me for my delicate hands. They’re soft, lovely hands that any man would be proud of.

Ah, but I had the last laugh against the bread that bit me. I bit it back many times, with pleasure, and roast beef. I bit it until it was nothing. (After having put it in the microwave to soften it up; I do learn my lesson sometimes.)