O brave new world that has cheeseburgers in it!

If a small child can be said to have a worldview, my worldview expanded exponentially the joyous day my grandmother bought me my first cheeseburger.

I was around five years old then, and the idea for franchised McDonald's outlets had yet to crystallize in Ray Kroc's imagination. But you could get a thick, juicy hamburger topped with American cheese, together with a side of salty fries, at just about any drugstore lunch counter, including—thank gods!*—the one in the Cunningham's drugstore at the corner of Harper and Gratiot in Detroit.

We walked up there, my grandma and I, from the old house on Townsend, and I had not the merest inkling that my small world was about to be changed for the better, forever. I would truly be a much altered, much happier kid on the hike back.

Sure, hamburgers had been around for eons, or decades at any rate, and cheese-topped hamburgers for almost as long. But not in my experience, because ours was not a hamburger family. My grandmother, who did all the cooking, didn't cook them. My grandfather knew not of the charcoal grill.† My mother knew not of the kitchen. My personal knowledge of ground beef began and ended with meatballs and spaghetti.

So, can you imagine my very first bite into a cheeseburger? Can you grasp the magnitude of the revelation which that was? The profundity of its impact on my worldview?

Had I known about the Big Bang theory back then, it would have been instantly relegated to second place in my hierarchy of cosmic consequence.

Oh, the thrilling mouth feel of high fat-content beef and semi-melted cheese! Oh, the savory, piquant union of impetuous mustard and impertinent pickle chip! Oh, the fabulous festival of flavor revealing to me a heretofore hidden host of possibilities in a new universe containing such unexpected truths as cheeseburgers!

Listen, I could not have been more gobsmacked had I been Moses tripping over a talkative shrub sporting non-scorching flames.

And once again I ask, how about you? Can you recall a similar worldview-expanding experience from your childhood? If so, I'm all figurative ears.

* Homage to Battlestar Gallactica.
† A grill is what you cook on; a grille is what you find on a car. Feel free to point out this distinction whenever you dine at somebody's "Bar & Grille."

# # #