"At the table of life there are forks in the road, and knives in the back. I keep a spoon handy in case life serves up dessert." Jessica Maier has that at the head of her blog, In Search of Dessert. It is not a food blog, as you might imagine, and although it is listed some places as an expat blog, she's been back in the USA (from Switzerland) for a month now, and she's all excited that her husband has a green card. It's a life blog, she says.

I read a wide variety of blogs, political, technical, entrepreneural, and what have you, but the life blogs end up being the ones that I really get hooked on. I didn't care much about biographies when I was growing up, and history was one of my least favorite subjects, but when I started newspapering, that all changed. It turned out that no matter what the other Ws were - who, what, where, when - the interesting part of the story was inevitably "why".

I started paying close attention to Charles Kuralt's "On The Road", and Oscar Frenette on WJR radio, who did a series called "Peopleworth - a gallery of people worth knowing." I never met either one of them, but they became my mentors. I found that I started interviewing people, I did best when I didn't stick to the subject.

If I was talking to some woman about the Pinewood Derby races being held in the basement of the Catholic Church, I'd ask her how she got involved. She had a kid. How old is he now? 34. What's he do? He's a cotton-picking chicken-plucker. You must be proud of him. And then she'd go off about some achievement of his that really made her proud. That's when the interview really begins to take off. She's talking about something she is passionate about, and passion makes for powerful reading.

Eventually, of course, I had to bring it full circle, connect it back up to the Pinewood Derby, so that I could tell her story in the Pinewood Derby article, but that was rarely difficult. The reason someone volunteers for a cub scout activity when their kid is 34 is because she thinks it makes a difference. It made a difference to her.

Yesterday afternoon, Blondie and I were at our computers. She was doing important work: I was reading blogs, when I ran across a mention that Jett Travolta had died. They mentioned on the blog that Jett was autistic, but that John and Kelly, being Scientologists, were unwilling to accept that; a lot of parents resist that label, even if they're not Scientologists. Blondie's done a lot of work with autistic-spectrum kids and adults, so I mentioned Jett's death to her. "What did he die of?" Jett was found unconscious in the bathroom. Apparently he had a seizure and hit his head on the tub.

Whether or not he was autistic, Jett had Kawasaki Syndrome. That's the most common autoimmune disorder of kids, but it can be managed. Consequently, it's not a disease kids usually die of. When Kelly Preston was on Montel Williams' TV show a couple of years ago, though, she explained how they were using Scientology mumbo-jumbo to treat it.

I've had to bury my own kid. It's a tragedy, no matter what the circumstance. John & Kelly were doing what they thought was best for their kid. But the next time someone tells you that Scientology isn't a dangerous cult, they may or may not be correct about "cult", but they're definitely wrong about "dangerous".

But at that particular table, life wasn't serving up dessert yesterday.

Last night, we were watching William Shatner's new Raw Nerve show on TiVO. The guest was Kelsey Grammer. At the age of 14, when he was being driven home from school by his mother, his mother told him that his father, a man he barely knew, had been shot and killed, and that his mother, divorced from him for years, grieved. His younger sister started experimenting with drugs shortly after that, and Kelsey took up surfing. It was a decade later when Kelsey got into drugs, and instead of light use for a couple of years, Kelsey developed a full-blown addiction.

When Kelsey was 38, he was shot by his wife - and at that point, he realized that his father had only been 38 when he had been killed. His sister was kidnapped and killed in 1975. His younger half-brother was killed by a shark in a SCUBA diving incident in 1980. He's had a colorful life, Blondie observed.

Color? You can bleep color. Of being tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail, Mark Twain said if it weren't for the honor of the thing, he'd have rather walked. I've had a colorful life, too, and like Mark Twain, I'd have rather walked. Where are all the spoons? Life ought to be offering up dessert.

I enjoy playing Microsoft's "Bicycle Board Games". There's a fairly decent Scrabble clone, and you can pick your opponent. The opponent I choose is a hardboiled '30s detective sort, because he seems to be the stiffest opponent. The thing is, you don't just get an opponent - you get trash talk. If you make a good play, he might say "You jump like a bad investor on a bridge". If you make a mediocre play, he might ask if he's supposed to give up.

And once in a while, if he hasn't anything else to say, he will say, "Good luck is like a friend who comes over, but doesn't stay for dessert."

To me, that doesn't sound like a friend.

I've done a lot of things and lived a lot of places in my too-colorful life, so I have a lot of acquaintances in a lot of places, but I define a friend as someone who doesn't have to be asked; he knows he's welcome to stay for dessert. In fact, I think a friend is someone who, if you're not there, feels comfortable letting himself in, grabbing a beer from the fridge, and waiting there for you to return.

A decade ago, a woman I'd met only online drove 10 hours to visit me - and decided to take me home and keep me. A few months later, we married. I didn't know a person at all within 50 miles, except for her - and due to my agoraphobia, I haven't exactly met many people. There are just a few neighbors, the doctor, the folks at the pharmacy, a few waitpersons at Waffle House, and a few of Blondie's friends.

And that's all right, I guess. For many of us with agoraphobia, the internet provides a window to the world, and it can be an awfully big window, if you push the boundaries.

But I keep looking for dessert, and I keep my spoon handy, just in case.

I just ran across that In Search of Desserts blog about two hours ago, and I can't say it's one of my favorites. Maybe in a month or two, I'll start to feel that way, but I hardly know the blogger at this point.

On the other hand, I've been reading Dilbert cartoons for several centuries, and I immediately felt sympatico with Scott Adams' Dilbert blog. Trying to find a place on the bed is hard with a wife, a dog, and a cat trying to share space. He has two cats, although his dog is a lot smaller than Marie.

You don't mess around with a wife, or a cat when they're sleeping; you could get clawed to death. He figured that if he moved the dog, he could get a comfortable position, so he did that, and it didn't even wake the dog. Sleeping with his belly against the dog, it was nice and cosy, and he decided it would work well if he used the dog as a sort of pillow. Marie loves it when I rest my head on her.

But then he decided he ought to put his arm around the dog, and his hand under her head - only to find her head missing. Oops. It turns out that instead of snuggling up to her neck, he'd been shoving his face into the dog's butt. He says he hopes that this doesn't turn out to be an omen of how 2009 will turn out.

Sometimes dessert is a husband you find in Switzerland. Sometimes it can't be found at all. And sometimes, just sometimes, it comes in the disguise of someone else's face in a dog's butt. There, but for the grace of God....

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
agoraphobia - autism - Bicycle Board Games - Charles Kuralt - dessert - Dilbert - dogs - Jett Travolta - Kawasaki Syndrome - Kelsey Grammer - Mark Twain - Oscar Frenette - passion - Pinewood Derby - Scientology - Scott Adams - spoons - William Shatner - WJR