There is a little town called Quepos that sits at the bottom of the Manuel Antonio hill on the raging Pacific Ocean. In the little town is a little park with brightly colored benches in peeling paint and towering mangoes trees that look like something out of the garden of Eden.
I occasionally sat on those park benches, waiting for this or that, usually a taxi to take me home, up the hill that only a mountain goat could climb. Often the locals would come and sit with me, or try to sell me something, or beg for a bit of cash.
Only once did someone try to sell me a chicken bone.
A used chicken bone.
A rather tallish man wearing an old t-shirt and dusty blue slacks approached me as I was sitting on my bench. He leaned into my space and, I must admit, he didn’t smell very good. But, I am not usually offended. I try to look past smells and such and see what is in front of me. This time, it was a mostly-eaten chicken leg. And in front of me it was, thrust very close to my face.
The tallish man was thin. His matted hair was curly and mostly grey. He spat a little as he spoke. Involuntarily, I leaned back while still trying to appear polite. I listened closely, trying to understand what he was saying as he rambled on, but my Spanish wasn’t very good and his speech was a little slurred, probably due to the tequila on his breath.
I did pick up the words chicken and ten cents and I thought I heard the word buy, which seemed a little confusing.
As I sat there wondering how I could get myself a little farther away from the meatless, waving bone without seeming too rude, another local street person came to my rescue.
"He wants to know if you want to buy his chicken bone," he offered.
"He will sell it to you for ten cents."
Ten cents was cheap, but I didn’t buy the used poultry. In retrospect, maybe I should have. Can you imagine the price a used chicken bone purchased from a poor man at a seaside park on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica could bring on eBay? I might have made a million.