Hot Dogs and Funerals

Book excerpt: Hotdogs and funerals—right down the street from the funeral home sits a local ice-cream shop that also serves hamburgers, fries, and other artery clogging prizes the entire family can enjoy. However, nothing tasted as good as the footlong hotdog with sauce or as, us, locals would mispronounce, “a footer with sauce.” Mm-hm, boy, howdy, are they good! When I would come home on leave from the air force, the first place I wanted to visit was that little ice-cream shop to order “a footer with sauce” or, in my younger days, “two footers with sauce.” Again, I’m hard to kidnap. Don’t judge. Well, wouldn’t you know it, one evening when my sister and I were still young, Igene and Irene returned from the funeral home with two footers with sauce. Both footers were laid out in a cardboard box...much like the people in the funeral home now that I think about. In the box, each footer was placed inside the paper sleeve with the ice-cream store’s name on it. Due to the ride home, the footers were a little cold, and some of the sauce were stuck to the paper sleeve as well as some of the bun. No matter the condition, my sister and I held our footers proudly as if we were going to raise them like flags before a defeated enemy after a long hard-fought battle with starvation. No doubt this is what the marines felt like raising the American flag after the Battle of Iwo Jima. Bombs burst in the air of our minds as we relished (no pun intended) in our wiener victory!