The Secret Recipe for Carl's Jr.'s New Pop-Tart Ice Cream Sandwich: Cut One Strawberry Pop-Tart in Half. Sandwich It Around a Scoop of Vanilla Ice Cream. Freeze. Charge Money.

I have been buried in the manuscript I'm currently editing. "Let's get this done!" said my client excitedly on the phone last week. "I've got another book in my head."

"Get writing," I told him.

Bring it on.

He also spent some time praising me. "You're the best editor I've worked with. You're so intuitive, and you get exactly what I'm trying to say." I try to remember that when I feel like my eyes are going to explode from staring at the computer screen and my shoulders and neck feel all tight from sitting hunched over. The life of an editor is not glamorous.

Well, I take that back. Husband came home from work with some coupons for free Pop-Tart ice-cream sandwiches from Carl's Jr., so on Saturday, I took the boys to get one each. They stayed and played on the playground for a good two hours while I edited my way through a respectable chunk of words and concepts. Though I couldn't stomach the idea of a Pop-Tart and freezer-burned ice-cream sandwich for myself, the boys had a great time and I got out of the house. I could tell the other customers were impressed with how official I looked, as if I was pointing out that here I was making money right in front of them! It could have been millions, for all they knew, right there in a fast food restaurant! I'm a fast typer, you see, so that looks impressive and glamorous. And I think I had changed into a shirt that wasn't stained. And maybe I put on some makeup. I can't remember. The fact that Little Gary's neglected ice-cream was slowly melting into a puddle all over the table (which I didn't see for a while because it was behind my laptop) probably only enhanced my glamour.

I had a sweet moment with Joseph while we were there. He had come to sit by me while he took a rest from playing, and he asked what I was reading. I happened to be checking a poem for accuracy that my client had included in his text, and I was enjoying the poem immensely (and if you know my history with poetry, you'll know that I don't say that often). The poem was The Calf-Path, by Sam Walter Foss. I read it out loud to Joseph and asked him what he thought it meant. He wasn't sure, so I told him the story about a woman who always cut the end off the roast before she cooked it. She never knew why she did that except that her mother used to do it, and one day when her mother was there, she asked her why she always cut off the end of the roast. The mother didn't know either, except that her mother used to cook the roast like that. They called the young woman's grandmother and asked her why she cut the end of the roast off. Did it help the taste? Did it enhance the cooking? The grandmother laughed and said that she always cut off the end of the roast because her pan was too small to fit the entire roast into it in one piece.

Joseph threw his head back and laughed. "I get it now," he said. "A little wobbly calf made a path and everyone followed it for 300 years without knowing why." We talked about how some traditions that we hold sacred and untouchable can actually have been the result of an accident or an unconscious action on someone's part, but that time and/or ignorance have hidden the reason for its beginnings. In the poem, men who followed the twisting path cursed it as they traveled it back and forth, turning a one mile distance into three miles. But they never thought to change it or make it straighter, and eventually its very antiquity gave it a sacred aura, though its beginning was caused by nothing more spectacular than a little wobbly calf walking through the woods to get home. Joseph thought about it for a while, and then he hugged me and ran back into the play area while I got back to work.

At least my intuition is good for something.