Spill a little mustard on your shirt for Franktuary, which sunsetted its brick and mortar a few years back, but still operates a food truck here and there I hear. 

Reverently prepared hot dogs.

Peter and I used to pilgrimage to their Lawrenceville location for boys day out Saturday lunches. 

And like the great philosophers of antiquity, we’d spend the purgatory between our ordering and our munching engaging in spirited, hangry debates over the universe’s cosmic questions. 

Does ketchup belong on a hot dog? 

Answer: as you will consistently find across both your meat-eating eastern and western religions, the creator intended ketchup for hamburgers, mustard for hot dogs. 

Are Franktuary’s fresh cut fries with garlic aioli better than Shorty’s fries with gravy?  

Answer: What, in life, is truly objective? Just as Plato and Kant tussled with that hot potato across centuries … Peter and I staged “The Great Potato Debate” across many a table over the years. He was unequivocally Team Frankturary. Me? I was polytheistic on the matter. For the ultimate answer … ask God next time you see her. 

Without irony, I believe that you can test the mettle of a good cathedral by the questions and conversations it engenders. 

Once, while Peter and I were debating metaphysics, Heidegger, and the nature of being — by which I mean whether honey mustard was a salad dressing (Peter) or a condiment (me) — a father and young son, both dressed in Pirates jerseys, sat down at a booth across from us. 

No sooner had they taken their seats when the son, maybe eight or nine, asked his Dad, “Who’s your favorite baseball player of all time?” 

Which settled the question of God’s existence for me once and for all. 

In dogs we trust.