The McDonald's Touch

Hi Readers! Things are hectic this week! Here's another excerpt from Second Day Reported. Thanks for reading!

I took my most hidden business to this room, including my first short story "On the Razor's Edge," a cheesy little piece of thinly-veiled autobiography that featured a troubled teenage girl on the edge of suicide, driven to it by her mother's neglect, evidenced by bringing home lukewarm McDonald's burgers instead of cooking a real dinner.

While I was righteously pissed off at my mother for lots of things, the McDonald's touch was pure fiction. I preferred fast food to almost any other, particularly the vile concoction that haunted much of my childhood -- LaChoy chop suey. LaChoy makes Chinese food swing American! sang their commercials and Beth and I would cry when we got word that we'd be having it for supper.

"On the Razor's Edge" never catapulted me to the literary success I had hoped it would, but it did garner one reader -- my mother. She caught me printing out a copy on our crappy dot matrix and seized upon it. "You don't like hamburgers, huh?" she said. I felt awful. As a girl, she'd been locked in a truck with her dog Sheba every Christmas while her parents drank themselves sick in some bar. They'd bring her a burger at the end of the night which she'd share with Sheba. No toys, no tree. "You're grounded for a week," she said, returning my story. The written word was just as mighty as all the religious folk said. You have one tongue and two ears, I often heard. "That's because God wants you to listen twice as much as you speak." I thought about my mother as a child riding in the back of her father's truck and hoping for a piece of free gum from the gas station attendant. She had a lot of cavities and the sugar hurt her teeth, "Even so, I loved it," she said. "Pain meant nothing to me." When my own life hit that particular road, I'd remember her words, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. I was her daughter after all.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache." Mae West.

Cocktail Hour

Drinking summer cocktail suggestion: Singapore Sling

Grenadine, gin, sweet and sour mix club soda, a touch of cherry brandy.

Splash grenadine in a Collins glass. Add gin and chilled sweet and sour soda. Add cherry brandy, leave unstirred, add a maraschino cherry on top.

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Thursday!