S'mores and stomping, with aplomb

While we were walking the track at the rec center, my retired colleague asked about my Labor Day weekend and I told her about the grandkids' camping trip in our back yard--sleeping in the tent, stomping in the creek, cooking out, making S'mores.

"Next time you have S'mores," she said, "You'd better invite me."

I struggled to picture my perfectly-pulled-together colleague messing around with marshmallows on a stick. "You know you can make them in the microwave," I pointed out.

"Right," she said, "But that's not how I like them."

This was an unexpected aspect of my former colleague's character. She is the ultimate in elegance, always perfectly manicured and with every hair in place. She never even broke a sweat despite walking briskly around the track for an hour only two months after her knee replacement. But she had very specific expectations for the perfect S'mores experience:

"I'll need two marshmallows, not one, and I'll hold them over the coals until they're just about to catch fire--not charred, but nice and crisp on the outside and gooey on the inside. Then I want to set them and the chocolate carefully between graham crackers and smash them together, and when I bite into it, I want the goo to drip down my face."

I agree that this is the ideal recipe for S'mores, but the thought of melted marshmallows and chocolate dripping down my elegant colleague's face was causing a little cognitive dissonance. Somehow she's always managed to sail through distressing circumstances without a hint of muss or fuss, so I wouldn't be surprised if she could handle the whole S'mores-making experience without a hint of melty goo on her chin or a drop of chocolate on a perfectly manicured fingernail. But it would be worth the experiment just to see how she does it.

And then when we're done, I'll see how she feels about creek-stomping. I'm sure she could stomp with perfect aplomb, a lesson in elegance for all of us.