Topical Guide 1035
Mark Dorset
Projects, Practical and Impractical
Disappointment
Inflating a Dog, Preface:
My mother had many schemes for businesses and many dreams about their success, and many of her schemes and dreams got as far as the dinner table. While my father and I ate, she would smoke and talk, nervously, laying out a plan for her audience of two, full of enthusiasm, until, in most cases, a moment came when her face fell, and she finished her proposal with her eyes down, as if the scheme were there on the tablecloth in front of her, falling apart before her eyes, shattering like the fragile ribbon candy that, at Christmastime, she liked to put out in dishes decorated with images of evergreen trees. […]
Sometimes, though, a scheme survived the dinner-table test […] because she put [it] back together out of the broken bits and held them together with the force of her determination, as she did with her plan to make ribbon candy, package it, and ship it far and wide as Ella’s Ribbons of Dee-lite.
I think it was obvious to all of us, even to her, that ribbon candy must be made in a factory by machines especially designed to extrude sugar syrup in a continuous ribbon, fold it back upon itself uniformly, and snip it off in lengths that fit into boxes.
See also:
Projects, Practical and Impractical TG 367, TG 569, TG 615, TG 800, TG 886; Ideal or Real TG 443; Difficult TG 714; Fallout Shelter: Stocking It TG 797; Desperate Measures TG 903
Disappointment TG 87, TG 113; Anticipation, Disappointment TG 98
Disappointment Island TG 46
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