THE NIGHT OF THE FLAMING MARSHMALLOWS


So there I was in the dark of the Japanese night with marshmallow smoke in my eyes, holding packages of graham crackers and marshmallows and chocolate pieces on my lap, a graham cracker half in each hand and waiting slabs of precisely broken chocolate on each knee as excited Japanese boys lunged at me with skewers tipped with flaming marshmallows.

Without recalling in too much explicit detail the number of Smores I must have eaten in my own ante-bilious days of long ago (I haven't Smored for some decades, and plan to Nmore during the remainder of my life), I simply recalled how much those childhood memories meant to me, and how essential Smores had been to those moments of youthful outdoor fireside cameraderie.

I would therefore do the same for Keech's middle-school friends, who had never had Smores in their thus-forsaken lives; indeed, pitiably, they had never even heard of marshmallows! Mine was therefore an international endeavor to set right a vast cultural injustice and imbalance, to bring our nations and cultures and eras and generations and whatnot, childhood feats of nausea etc., closer together around the campfire of life, to share in experiences that would weave our lives into one big chocolaty sticky marshmallow world for the future good of all mankind.

I could almost hear the national anthems being played, with the flaming Sta-puf Man in the background, along with "There was a man who had a dog and Bingo was his name, oh," sung through crammed Smore mouthfuls while the singers swayed from side to side around the brightly blazing fire just before the horror stories began.

In any case, these citizens of the future would not soon forget this night; nor would they suddenly throw up in the car on the way home, ha ha. I would not forget either, how quickly I learned that it had not been I myself who had made all the Smores in those historic times; it had been the attending and well-prepared adults who had made all the Smores, may all blessings reside upon their unsung souls.

I was the solo attending adult now, and not well prepared, and I have never experienced anything quite like the stark fiery horror involved in being surrounded in the forest at night by a horde of urgently flaming marshmallows on sharply pointed, fire-hardened stakes as I reached out to choose and compress just one, only one! one at a time boys! from among them (as the flaming marshmallows shimmered there in the dark like visiting Buddhist souls), topping it with a slab of chocolate and sandwiching it between two tiny halves of a graham cracker in the dark, with my bare hands, by fitful firelight.

After such an experience, oneself does not cry for Smore. Nor can oneself put down any of the many things one holds, for one is sticky. Very sticky. So sticky as to be very nearly one with the universe, there in the dark with marshmallow smoke in one's eyes and warm chocolate somewhere on one's lap in the dark, being poked at by flaming points and deafened by international cries for Smore!!.

Thus a single Autumn night in the life of the intrepid cultural ambassador.

And Happy Birthday, Keech.