Here, let me show you how it's done

You'd be surprised how often Friday comes around.

Sure, it's once a week for you.

But for me, every day is "You better think of something for Friday's column, buster."

Let me show you how a column gets done. Please pay attention.

As I am writing this, it is about 1 p.m. on Thursday. I've just had a wonderful lunch at my favorite Chinese restaurant. What I need is a nap.

I could have written this column any other day of the week. There's no law that says I have to wait until Thursday afternoon.

But I'm human.

I do exactly what you'd do in the same situation: I wait until the last possible moment.

(It is 1:05 p.m., by the way, if you're watching the clock.)

Here I sit, searching through my mind for an appropriate column topic. That's how every column starts: This Week's Topic. As you can tell, I don't have a topic this week. Which is why I'm rambling on about writing this column, pretending you might be even faintly interested in how a writer does what he does. Which is write.

(There. I've laid another three minutes to rest. 1:08 p.m.)

By the way, my Chinese lunch seems to have met some unsavory characters, possibly from another continent, in my stomach. Now, in addition to having to think about writing a column, I'm having to deal with a great deal of internal churning. That's probably a sign I ate too fast. Or too much. Or both. Or have a column to write with no topic.

When I was growing up on Killough Valley in the Ozark hills over yonder, we didn't have Chinese food. I was led to believe such a meal wouldn't have been very filling. I was informed that children in China were starving and would be tickled to have the plate of macaroni and stewed tomatoes I had been staring at for half an hour.

Neither did my favorite hometown have a Chinese restaurant. It had a restaurant. And a cafe. And a drive-in. And the lunch counter at Toney's Rexall Drug Store. What people ate in China was of no particular interest to the proprietors of those establishments.

To eat a meal at a Chinese restaurant would have required a trip to St. Louis, and the idea of traveling that far just to eat out -- with strangers, no less -- was something that would never have entered anyone's mind in my family. There had to be a darn good reason to make such a trip, and eating out wasn't even at the bottom of the list. Besides, we had plenty to eat, and that plate of macaroni and stewed tomatoes wasn't going to disappear by itself. Unfortunately.

Eating out in my favorite home town meant eating pretty much what you would eat at home, only cooked by people you didn't know that well. And you had to pay particular attention to rules of etiquette when you ate in public. Etiquette, I learned at an early age, is minding the same manners required at home -- only with other people watching you.

The worse thing that could possibly come of a restaurant meal in those days, I'm sure, was the remote possibility that some other mother might lean over to one of her children and say in a voice loud enough to be heard two or three tables away: "See that Sullivan boy? See how he's slouching in his chair. And he picks his nose. And chews with his mouth open. Now straighten up, or you'll wind up just like that Sullivan boy."

That would have been, as I'm sure many of you well know, the end of a tranquil life full of potential and hope.

(It's now 1:40 p.m. I've been back over parts of this column several times and changed a few things here and there. But, if you're still paying attention, you might notice this space is filled. In newspaper lingo, that means I'm done.)

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.