I've just spent the last three hours doing several things at once: re-writing and expanding a humorous piece for submission someplace as yet undetermined, sniffling continuously from an allergy attack, and singing in my head this Maxine Nightingale disco song over and over even as other music played on the stereo. Meanwhile the snow is swirling outside like a dust storm, it's like a Joad Family Christmas out there. The ground is frozen like tundra. Portland lawns shouldn't crunch.

I spent most of my childhood years in suburban Maryland, near DC, where the lawns often crunched in wintertime. I just now remembered Gino's Hamburgers, a comfortingly mediocre regional chain. I can picture in my mind the sign. Unless I'm totally bananas, Gino's also served Kentucky Fried Chicken, the distinctive bucket was often affixed to the same pole. Could this be true? Their signature burger was called the Gino Giant, "a banquet on a bun."

Speaking of Kentucky Fried Chicken, I remember as a little kid being gaga for their chocolate cream pies, which were illuminated in a rotating glass display case. These were regulation full-size pies, like in a bakery or supermarket. I always got my pie, but what I really loved was to carry the bucket. I'd hold it in my arms on the way back to the car, cradling it gently like an infant made of steaming poultry parts, enjoying its heat and that smell of fried chicken wafting up from the notched openings in the lid. Fast food day was such an event. One time we pulled into the McDonald's parking lot, and I was so thrilled that I clambered out of the back seat and slammed the door shut on my little sister's thumb as she was trying to get out of the car. Her thumbnail later turned black and fell off, a gruesome process about which I was updated continually for some reason. I guess my mother wanted me to feel the sting of remorse. I was scolded for being so overcome with food lust that thumbs and who knows what else were being victimized by the singlemindedness of my insatiable desires. I was asked, presumably rhetorically, whether in fact I had any shame at all.