In Mind of Chilidogs

Today was all about spending time with the dogs (after they spent yesterday kenneled and glaring at the plumber) and getting ready for my remaining writer's group meeting. My reading was on hold until I found out a magazine that I read every so often was out.

In between articles about this and that and the physical pinions of the literary south, there was an article about cookbooks. A wire connected in my brain and I was back at camp, staring out the window of a tiny car with a chilidog in my lap. Even though we were under pretty strict instructions to not eat except for what was provided by the camp (which was generously prepared by church women who volunteered to come out and cook for a church full of high school kids), since you just never know what kind of things sensitive city stomachs might encounter, we weren't about to turn down a gift of a dish full of hot dogs buried under chili and cheese.

I was a snotty kid at that age. I didn't eat chili. You don't pass up the gift of food, though. Our adult counselor took the first one and ate it heartily, said thank you and set an example of kindness in a situation that could have been crazily fraught with "oh we couldn't" subtexted with "you don't think we're going eat THAT?"

Sometimes, to quote Real Genius, good writing is a like a laser that couples to a state that couples to a ground state and burns straight through to a piece of time, polishing it as it exposes the bones of the memory. A human story in which you can feel the presence of the human.

It's probably just because I've been spending so much time staring at the screen lately and relatively little face to face with others; however, the idea of making the novel into something like those chilidogs appeals to me. Perhaps you didn't want it, perhaps you were thinking about refusing it; in the end, though, the words were good and you survived the meal.

Good reading.