S’mores, anyone?
My father had a rather impressive stack of firewood, the remnants of a few trees fallen by Katrina. On Thanksgiving night, he decided to light a fire so we could all gather around.
If your family lights a bonfire in the middle of a residential area, you might be a redneck.
A few moments later, a warm fire roared to life, and my family and their friends gathered around with glasses of wine and bottles of beer. My father’s best friend, a doctor from Argentina, began telling stories as the glasses of wine flowed more freely… occasionally, much to my father’s dismay, he would get up and add more wood to the fire, which began to grow progressively larger and hotter. Another story, another glass of wine, another pile of wood… my father’s face grew more pained as the once large stack of firewood began to dwindle quickly.
“Hey, amigo, slow down, eh?” he called out to his friend, who ignored his request and instead piled on four more pieces of wood. The embers beneath the fire glowed a bright orange; the heat was becoming so intense that I had to keep pushing my chair backwards. This resulted in the conversation growing louder, since everyone kept pushing farther back from the fire. A little while later, the neighbor’s head popped over.
“Hey, ya’ll? What’s going on?”
A few moments later, he joined us, the redneck war stories growing more animated… somewhere during the course of the conversation and seven more pieces of wood, someone mentioned s’mores.
“You can’t roast mashmallows over pine! It’ll make you sick!” claimed the doctor’s office manager, another close friend of the family… this lead to another heated discussion over the carcinogen content of pine, which sounded largely circumstantial to me, personally. I held my tongue and watched the barbs fly back and forth like a spectator of a tennis match. A few moments later, the doctor raked the coals back and placed the last four pieces of wood on the fire… My father finally had enough.
“I don’t know about s’mores, but right now, you’re roasting my weiner!”
And that, my friends, is what family & friends are all about.