Michael D. Davis.

Well, here it is, the 50th Magic Mike column. Fifty stories, fifty rants, fifty late nights, thousands of words, one book, and one award. What started as a joke column name has turned into something astounding. Nothing I could have imagined.

Writing this column is different than writing anything else for me. Mainly because in these paragraphs, I talk about myself and my family, of course. But it isn’t just different, it has a whole different vibe. When I write my council articles, my supervisor articles, or a story about Joe Schmoe, I can usually feel with every line I write that someone is going to read it. When I write my Magic Mike articles I feel the absolute opposite, I don’t think anyone ever is going to read it. The paper is the last thing on my mind.

It’s like I sit down in the middle of the night, usually around two or three am, and write something in a diary or a journal. Then I go to bed and I don’t think about it. Next thing I know, I’m at the store and someone mentions it to me, and I’m like, “Oh yeah, that was published.”

It also helps that these are all 100% true stories about me and my family. The weird, the nuts, the strange, the Davis family. And don’t think you’re getting out of here without a Davis family story, this here’s the 50th. I had to find a good one though, and Ma suggested I tell this one.

This was a couple years back. I swung by an old buddy’s place to see how he was doing. We ended up talking on his porch as his little boy ran around playing. On his porch, close to the door, sat this big electric smoker. The dude had borrowed it off a friend or cousin or someone and had been smokin’ all kinds of different meat all day. We’d be talking, and mid-sentence he’d reach into the smoker and take out a chunk of something and start chewing on it.

I can’t remember how it happened, but through a series of events, it came to be that my family was gonna bring over some meat and try out the smoker too. We were gonna sit around, smoke some meat, and have a nice night.

So, this was a Sunday, my Ma didn’t get off work till five, and then she’d have to drive home. In preparation, my sister brought a whole ton of meat over to my buddy’s place and got started smokin’ it all. We had chicken, steak, and pork — if there was a slab of a dead animal at the store, my sister had bought it.

It was about four in the afternoon, and my sister kind of eased my buddy aside and took control of the smoker. We talk, fun is had, the meat cooks. My Ma got off work, stopped by the house then ended up with us, in my buddy’s front yard. This is nearly 6:00. My sister says it can’t be too much longer, so Ma takes a seat.

More time goes by, more conversation is had, and the food still isn’t done. My sister is using the smoker-attached thermometer to gauge the meat, but to be even more careful, she’s also using my Ma’s digital thermometer from home.

None of the meat is up to temperature. My buddy is changing settings on the smoker, hitting buttons here, and there trying to see what the problem is. He’d been cookin’ meat on the thing all day, and now it’s working right.

Finally, we decided to give up. We’ll take our portion of the meat, head home, and throw it in the oven. But that’s when it happened. That was the moment that everything had become clear.

The mystery of how a seemingly perfectly functioning smoker couldn’t cook meat in nearly four hours was solved. My Ma’s digital thermometer, somehow along the way, got switched to Celsius from Fahrenheit. My sister for hours kept checking the meat and looking at this thermometer, shaking her head and thinking it was all barely lukewarm.

If this little detail hadn’t been sussed out and we decided to keep on trying with the smoker, we’d still be sittin’ on my buddy’s porch. Now, whenever I see my sister using the thermometer It forces me to ask whether it’s set to Celsius or Fahrenheit. Of course, this isn’t mockery, just genuine concern.