Birth of a Movement: Entreprenuers Striving to Change the World

So everything was going great. I was researching foundations, writing a query letter to them explaining who we are, and making a list of things to do before I left at five to meet some unmet friends for dinner about an hour away. I was struggling with the letter….it all had to be right. The organization of the information, the words, the facts. The only thing in the whole world that I am a perfectionist about is my writing. For those of you who think writing is easy for writers, you might enjoy this quote from Thomas Mann. He speaks for all of us:  “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

But I was doing it and the words were piling up nicely.

Then it was time to go. I left early because I’d never been to the town in Maryland where we were meeting. The drive wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been and I was happily listening to NPR in the almost rush hour traffic. Then, after I’d been on the road for forty-five minutes, the guy on the radio said something about “the weather on this fifth day of October …”  No! Our dinner was on the sixth!”  I got off the 495 highway going north and got back on going south.

I’d been thinking all the way about pupusas…a national dish in El Salvador that they served at the restaurant . Now I wasn’t going to have them. So I got to thinking about national dishes and suddenly I wanted, needed, craved a Big Mac. Yes, I couldn’t wait to bite into a Big Mac. I get that urge about once a year. This was my Big Mac day. I smiled in anticipation; but I had no idea where I would find a McDonalds. I decided that I would take my chances and hope that those yellow arches would appear. I couldn’t remember any along the way, but I stuck to the route home.  Then, miraculously and by mistake, I turned the wrong way on South Van Dorn and there they were, inviting me to have my Big Mac. I got into a long line of cars, two of which were strangely trying to back out of the Drive-In order line.

I ordered my Big Mac and the voice in the machine informed me that they had no meat.  I thought I didn’t hear right. I ordered again. No meat. No hamburgers. No Big Macs. But I was in a McDonalds. There had to be meat. That’s the definition of McDonalds. “We have no meat,” she said for the third time.

Now once upon a time I was in a vegetarian McDonalds in India….but this was Alexandria, Virginia. No meat really meant no meat. Apparently the truck with the meat never arrived.  I ordered six chicken nuggets and a small French fries and drove back to the house where I am house-sitting. Not a good day!!!

Tomorrow it will be pupusas…and the good news is that I know how to get there.