Slice of Life

My wife came home from visiting her dermatologist this evening with two colorful band-aids on her neck. I told her it looked like she'd been attacked by a vampire . . . . which brought to mind Bram Stoker's Dracula, a book I read when I was about 13. It scared the bejesus out of me. I can still remember some otherwise forgotten summer afternoon, eating a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich while reading that Victorian shocker. I remember being almost afraid to turn the pages but utterly compelled to do so, simultaneously safe in my parent's living room but also locked in a moldering castle in Transylvania . . . .