For someone better at small talk
it would've been as easy as pie to delight while standing in line at the bakery behind a woman and a little boy—Jack, she called him—and cause them to exclaim, What amazing knowledge you have and thank you so much for sharing!
But, clearing my throat, I began thusly: did they know that dogs once toiled in treadwheels mounted above kitchen fireplaces, the animals limping around and around—Think a hamster, I said to Jack; he had spaniel eyes and muddy knees—to rotate a meat spit on the hearth? Given her gaping mouth, the woman did not know this, nor that if a hog weighed one hundred and fifty pounds, and if early sources regarding cook times were accurate, the dog could be spinning for thirteen solid hours—Nearly as long as we'll be in this queue, ha, ha.
Turnspit dogs had very short legs—Like a wiener dog, I said to give Jack a fun visual—and were, according to Charles Darwin, an example of selective breeding although he didn't know how stumpiness is inherited, that a condition known as chondrodysplasia which causes long bones to stop growing requires only one copy, not two, of a mutated gene to occur—In other words, I whispered to Jack, a mommy could be solely to blame.
And, before turnspit dogs, there actually were wee boys who worked ye olde meat spits, poor boys sweating and straining before roaring fires, waifs in the lowliest job in rich men's households who were—I elbowed Jack to drive history home, so he'd never forget—called spitjacks.
I thought my story ended well, little kids and low-slung dogs living happily ever after once a mechanical spit-turner was invented in the 1840s, but the woman did not: her face sour like the lemon-lime pie I was waiting and waiting for, she stared a stinger then spat nails—We will not swallow any of this. You're weird. Go away.—but, truly, I didn't make up a single word of it nor say anything about Jack being, in my opinion, rather short-legged.
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