One spring when I was about ten, I was home alone after school. I don't know where the rest of the family was, but I did my chores as quickly as possible so I could join the rest of the neighborhood boys in our field for a baseball game. As I was dashing through the house and yard doing my jobs, I worked up an early appetite and thought I should prepare some nutritious morsel before the ordeal of a baseball game.

In the refrigerator I found frankfurters. Not hotdogs. These were the fat — literally fat, I'm sure — tubes of meat strung together. You bought them at a butcher's shop, and these were wrapped in the butcher's white paper. So, I threw a pan on the stove with some water and tossed in the frankfurter to boil while I got an inning of exercise before my snack.

It was a clear day, th…