The Meat Of The Goodie

All roads lead to the meat of the goodie.

Then again, it's a narrow, one way street that gets there. You have to zero in. It's the treasure at the center, and there's some narrowing, focusing, and honing of your sights, before you eventually arrive.

I'm eating the meat of the goodie in a peanut butter cup right now. At that's right at the heart of the thing, surrounded as it is by chocolate, then a paper cup, then a sealed paper wrapper, then a cardboard tray, then an outer wrapping of plastic that must be pierced. But before being in your hands and ready to pierce, you have to go get one at the store, requiring your desire, attention, and all the rest. And requiring before that a job (or government disability, in my case -- game toe) in order to have the money to procure a pack of them.

Grandpa Slump taught me about the meat of the goodie, in all his years of cracking and removing the meat from hickory nuts. I used to watch him do it. That's the only time he ever wore glasses, because I guess he really wanted to focus on doing it right. Some of the details escape me now after all these years. He'd be at the dining room table with his glasses on, a knife in hand, maybe a cracker of some sort, working endlessly at piling up a bowl full of the meat of the goodie.

That was his phrase actually -- the meat of the goodie. Maybe he heard it said by his Grandpa down in the southern part of Missouri. If so, it could've gone back many generations to the very first Grandpa, who simply made it up as an apt description of what we're all after. We're all zeroing in on that center. That meat. Of the goodie.

Think of your honeymoon. Or having to wash up during a shower.

Think of the Temple in Jerusalem. They had the meat of the goodie there. All the outside business, the courts, the chambers, the other courts, the other chambers, and we're getting closer. Then -- you and I can't see it -- there it is, in there somewhere, right at the heart of the thing.

It's good to remind myself about the meat of the goodie. May all your thoughts, say in the next three minutes, focus in on the meat of the goodie.