It’s amazing how hard it is to find a hot ham and cheese poboy around town these days. Ham and cheese and hot sausage and roast beef used to be the staples for anyone who did sandwiches. Pretty much everybody still rolls a roast beef, but the ham and cheese and smoked or hot sausage have faded away. Years ago when I had taken a break from school and hired on as a rodman for a survey company, we would be all over south Louisiana surveying swamp land that would eventually become subdivisions and every Pak-a-sac, Quick Stop, Fred and Judy’s convenience store would make their own ham and cheese, and sausage or roast beef poboys and we would file in, collect a Schlitz tall boy and order our sandwiches, then go outside and sit on the tailgate or just cop a squat on the sidewalk leaning back against the wall and chow down before firing up the mandatory after food cigarette. Mandatory for the time anyway. Jed’s is making good on their promise to be a local hangout. Jawing with the barkeep about the bad weather heading our way kind of felt a little like those old days. And the poboy locked it down. Just as good. Just as much exactly what I needed right then and there. I had an unsweet tea instead of a Schlitz tallboy and I had to give up smoking ten or twelve years back, but I enjoyed that thirty minutes thinking about everything that happened back when you could get a great ham and cheese poboy like Jed’s on every other corner.