USA. A church lunch. Megan put a heavy glass dish in my hands.

On the rim, a strip of tape. My name, in marker, the way a soldier is labeled before a river crossing.

“You bring it back,” she said. “Empty is fine. Missing is a crime.”

I carried the dish like a relic. People praised a yellow food I did not cook. I bowed each time, which made the dish more famous than it deserved.

Three days later the empty dish was on my porch.

There was a note.

YOUR TURN.

I sat with the note until the sun moved. In my country a returned bowl is the end of a kindness. Here a returned bowl is a loaded weapon. Someone must fill it.

I called Megan. “What do I make?”

“Whatever,” she said. “If it sloshes, put foil on it. If it sloshes after the foil, you are family.”

I made too much. This also seemed to be the law. I wrote my name on fresh tape, larger, in case the dish got lost and needed to find its way home like a horse.

At the next lunch a woman I did not know said, “You’re the casserole guy.”

I had been renamed again. I accepted it. The dish had done the introducing.

So tell me, America.

When you send a man his own empty armor and write YOUR TURN — is that hospitality, or conscription?

And the tape with the name. Is it so the glass comes home, or so the person cannot hide?

Your turn.