Is a hotdog a sandwich? Why or why not? Show your work.

I never knew my grandmothers. I never knew — and never will know — what it is like to be picked up from school by a grandmother, given birthday gifts, smell that secret cookie recipe, have that pinky-promise-always level of friendship and love with someone from a generation so far from your own.. What’s it like to watch your parents talk to their own mother? I’ll never know. How much will my mother shrink as she ages? How much will I?

Both my grandmothers fell victim to breast cancer. My paternal grandmother passed just when my father started college — the day after my uncle’s birthday. My maternal grandmother died after I was born, living just long enough to know me, but not long enough for me to know her.

What I do have from my grandmothers is translated through family-meal traditions and memories involving food. For example, my father hardly likes to make or eat pork chops because his mother was a TERRIBLE cook, and the stories of chewing on dry poorly spiced pork chops have turned my entire family off to the meal. Yet my dad still laughs about how he would fake it so he wouldn’t hurt her feelings.

My mom would cook the recipes that her mother would make her, most likely passed down from her mother and her mother before that. Comfort food from the Italian side of my family. From the side that grew up on a farm, that lived creating their own resources, grabbing the eggs right from under the chickens and shooing the cats away from the hen house.

And that’s where my favorite childhood comfort meal was born — hotdogs, cheese, and eggs.

The dish was simple: cut and fry up a hotdog or two, throw in some scrambled eggs, and finish it off with American cheese. So comforting and delicious, so perfectly filling, and a dish with meaning. My mother, without fail when stirring in the eggs: “My grandmother would make this for me.”

One time in kindergarten, we were playing the “picnic” game, where everyone before you lists a food they would bring to a picnic and then you have to repeat all the others and add your own. I remember being so proud that I could successfully name the 10 or so items that came before me. Sitting in complete angst the whole time before it was my turn, nervous I would forget an item. My kindergarten teacher politely prodded when I forgot to add my own.

“What would you bring, Olivia?”

I didn’t know what to answer at first, with everyone in kindergarten judging so hard on everything you said and did at that age. My cheeks already flushed.

So I said the first thing that came to mind: “I’d bring hotdogs, cheese, and eggs.”

My teacher looked at me, barely holding back her annoyance that I didn’t follow the directions (we never quite got along).

“You can only bring one thing, dear. What one thing would you bring?”

I didn’t understand what she was saying. Hotdogs, cheese, and eggs WAS one thing. Didn’t everyone know that? Didn’t everyone love it too? Didn’t they know this was the thing my mother plated for me on the weekends for a special breakfast, the thing she whipped up for dinner because breakfast-for-dinner was always so EXCITING? It was one thing, and usually the only thing, I wanted to eat.

I didn’t know how to answer my kindergarten teacher and she snapped at me again. Finally I said, “Hotdogs.”

And the game moved on, my face more flushed than before.

Here’s the thing about hotdogs: there are so many opportunities with them. Savory, spicy, cheesy, hidden under chips, shared at a baseball game, eaten quickly when pressed for time. Roasted over a fire surrounded by friends.

I remember exactly how I used to eat hotdogs as a kid. I would put them in the bun and I would put on ketchup. That was it. Just ketchup. My mother would always shake celery salt over hers and I didn’t understand, that seemed gross. My father slathered his with onions and relish and I never quite understood that either.

That’s the thing about hotdogs. They can be different for everyone, yet hold the same weight, and emotion, and a hold a story behind them. Everyone has a hotdog story.

A friend of mine is known for reading stories out loud during live events. Often times, bad fan fiction. I’m talking Garfield and Kate Middleton levels of bad and deeply uncomfortable fan fiction. The first time I truly hung out with Mark was when he came into our hotel room at a Harry Potter conference in 2013. My friend Proma was reading a memoir called “My Little Red Book” — essays from comedians about having their periods for the first time.

We asked Mark to read from the book. Without question (yet with maybe a bit of fear) he flipped open to the table of contents and picked out the story that sounded like it would be the worst to read — “Hotdog on a String”

And that’s how I came to never look at a tampon the same way again.

It’s funny, the places that food and memories and lineage can lead us. The things we talk about with strangers, or don’t talk about. I would say one of the weirdest first dates I’ve ever been on was to a library. A place where you specifically DON’T talk. It was like taking the movie first date to a whole new (and much quieter) level. It was only after we silently walked through a “History of the Future” exhibit in complete silence that I told this first-date about needing to write an essay about whether or not a hotdog was a sandwich. It was a perk request through the first Wizards in Space crowdfund when you could purchase commissioned writing about any topic. And this was what one person chose. An essay I called “Is a hot dog a sandwich? Why or why not? Show your work.”

We talked for a really long time about it. I was surprised. I was hopeful. It was the first time in a while that I felt the flutter in your stomach — those nervous butterflies. I felt like I had found something I forgot was missing. When suddenly your life starts to make sense. When you not only meet someone you could love one day, but someone you could see becoming your best friend. Maybe.

That relationship began and ended with hotdogs in the short time of 3 months.

The night we broke up, I had gone over to his apartment with every intention of ending it almost immediately. I wanted to walk through the door, say the dreaded “I think we should talk” line. Talk Get hurt. Not cry. Leave. Cry

Somewhere, that plan derailed. As most break-up plans tend to do.

As I picked him up from his parents house (I’m so nice), he was sitting outside waiting for me. He was wearing a shirt I brought back for him from LeakyCon. I never thought I would see him wear it. That it would always stay rolled up and forgotten in the back of a drawer, and that his appreciation was just faked. “Thanks another tshirt!”

I knew I was in trouble when he opened the door to my car, LeakyCon logo in sight, right over his heart.

He had been on vacation. His hair was much lighter, and his skin was sun-kissed and glowing. He looked good. I didn’t want him to look good. I wanted this to be easy and I wanted the butterflies on the inside to die down, or just die, so I could do this quickly. Talk. Get hurt. Not cry. Leave. Cry.

We started driving and he began to whisper-singing to Taylor Swift. This wasn’t going as planned. By the time we had gotten to his apartment, I already had him laughing, which was frustratingly a sound that I had become attached to, and this wasn’t going as planned.

By the time we were settled into his one-room studio, he was cooking himself dinner. He threw some hotdogs into a pan and set the heat to high.

As the hotdogs cooked, they smelled horrible. Something was not right.

Throughout our short relationship, I was always googling something. Well, I was always googling something anyway, but he was the first person that pointed it out to me. He told me he liked that I had an affinity for googling things, and that I was good at it.

He also pointed out that I get myself into the weirdest situations, to which I replied, “Everything about me is an ordeal.” I hate to admit it, but he wasn’t wrong.

Google told me that when hotdogs are bad, they turn grayish, get slimy, and start to smell bad when cooking. His tiny apartment could not contain the smell, and this was not going as planned. It was already late. He was cranky from not eating. I hadn’t broken up with him yet.

He threw out the hotdogs and I knew that was it. He’d cook a quick bowl of pasta, and I would wait patiently while he ate. And even with the scent of spoiled hotdogs in the air, I’d finally ask.

“Is this going anywhere?”