Thank you my AW friends for your comments
- ALWAYS appreciated.
WHEW! I hope you've all caught your breathe after the nonstop action-packed, riveting stories and sightings of this trip so far….
Unfortunately, this entry will be no different - ZZZZzzzzz
Some more sightings from the Skukuza area:
After all the day's excitement, we lit the charcoal and settled in around the evening fire.
I began to reminisce about days gone by and my own experience with making charcoal.
Charcoal: a lightweight, black residue, consisting of carbon and any remaining ash, obtained by removing water and other volatile constituents from animal and vegetation substances.
How Was Charcoal First Discovered?
I'm pretty sure I know, as I once made charcoal unwittingly. (Who makes charcoal "wittingly"
?)
One mundane Friday night during my college years I put a potato into the oven to bake. Shortly thereafter I received an unexpected phone call from my boyfriend (and later husband) inviting me over to his place. At that age dinner was one thing, young "love" (used in its loosest sense), another. God did not intend them to be an either/or choice, I was pretty sure. As the saying goes, one thing led to another. You could, it seems, have your (beef)cake, and eat too. (
Apologizes to Marie Antoinette or Rousseau, as it is rumored}.
Three days later I returned to my apartment.
There, in the oven, was a beautiful black concrete lump - viola! charcoal!!
An excellent example of an unexpected benefit of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
I could imagine it becoming a new Redneck pick-up line: "
Hey, baby, you and me ('cause proper grammar is the least of their skills) could make sweet charcoal together…"
Or a new limerick:
I once knew a single-minded guy
Whose offer I couldn't deny
I forgot the tater in the oven
For a weekend of lovin'
And returned to a nugget for the braai.
To this day I smile each time I open a bag of charcoal and think about all the lucky lasses who also inadvertently made these lumps of love in their youth.
(I'm pretty sure Elvis's song
"Hunk'o Hunk'o Burnin' Love" pays homage to this very phenomenon.)
