salad daze

I am really wired, beyond a helpful amount, at the moment. I’m sure that I can pin the condition, at least in part, to the additional cups of coffee we bought at the Marvelous Market on Nebraska Avenue, which--truth be told--was less than marvelous. I’m mainly gauging this quality ranking by hotness of the coffee. In this case it was tepid, reminding me of why I prefer Gary’s Grill to The Breakfast Shoppe for breakfast. Coffee should be served at a not-quite-drinkable hotness. This is not a rule that is bendable, except in cases of medical-based mouth-sensitivity conditions.

Still, this particular trip--to and from Georgetown for dose #2 of the hypodermic substance of unknown composition and efficacy--was, for the most part, pleasant and unfraught with peril. I made up the word unfraught. I hope you like it.

No, the only dicey aspect of the medical visit was that Jeff kept lying down perpendicular and abdomen-up on the bed in the room, with his head hanging backward over the edge, which made the nurses fret that he’d be dizzy when he stood up. I was not worried, as I have known Jeff to recline in odd positions for what seems like forever.

Upon being sprung for the afternoon, we headed up Wisconsin Avenue in search of food. I slowed down in the neighborhood of a parking meter, but ultimately bypassed Heritage India, because I knew that although Jeff would not push his preference, it leaned in the direction of the Tex-Mex place I mentioned having seen many times in passing. Instead, we continued north, parking 3 blocks west of the Cactus Cantina where I feared I’d have to ferret carefully between menu lines to avoid meat and cheese. I ordered a salad--a “Sunshine Salad,” expecting to be gustatorially bored. I was not. Heaped with orange slices, avocado, walnuts, corn, pepper strips, dried tomatoes, and field greens, deftly bathed in a peanut dressing, it was a most satisfactory concoction, and I scarfed the whole pile, which was unlike me. Then I snarfed the rest of the tortilla chips so as not to be carb-deprived. Jeff seemed equally pleased with his chicken-accented Monterey salad.

Here was the only event of concern at lunch. We entered the lively dining-joint which was festooned with cowboy boots and placards of Mexican cinema...(example: El Caballo del Diablo. Well, if you aren’t interested in a film about Beelzebub as a horse in need of a good exorcism, I’m not sure where your priorities lie)...and we sit down. No, wait...

Before we sit down we have to follow the hostess to our table. Which I do. Then, I turn around and realize I have lost Jeff. I backtrack around a column and espy him standing 15 or so feet down the corridor, looking dazedly this way and that. I wave. He spots me. Then we sit down.

There is, just across the street, a derelict corner being retrofitted into a wine bar, and the predominant architectural feature--at the moment--is tarpaper. Jeff says That’s a familiar sight.
What?, I say.
The tarpaper, Jeff says.
Where have we had tarpaper outside the window before? I ask.
Here. he says certainly.
We’ve never been here before, I say...but just as I say it, I am ready to kick myself. He looks at me like a kid who’s just been told there’s no Santa Claus, and, by the way, that he’s really adopted. He does not pursue it, but I can see that this is a troubling thing, and that we’re beginning to touch the edges of that time I know is coming when my kindest response will be to accept whatever he says as his reality. Not until we’re leaving does he bring it up.
Come here, he says, pulling me toward a 2-sided glass case full of southwest paraphernalia, through which you can see the dining room we just left. We sat right there. He points slightly south of the table we just vacated.
No, I say, It must just look a lot like somewhere else we’ve eaten.

The rest of the drive home is better, but there have been those moments throughout the day, and I wonder, not entirely seriously, if that’s what happens when you hang your head off a bed for too long.

want a cubyrop candy?

Gabe is off all week due to Spring Break. My options include tolerating his nocturnal, raccoon-like habits which extend to rummaging through every food-bearing receptacle in the house all night (between blowing away zombies and antlions in Half-Life 2), or coercing him into the odd field trip in a futile attempt to nudge him toward humanoid behavior. Today, we opted for a field trip.

So, piled into the Soobie--Gabe and Jeff in back, Olivia riding shotgun (after convincing her dad he had more leg-room that way,) we forged the dusty--or at least exhausty--trail to H Mart in Catonsville.

The real name of H Mart is Han Ah Reum, and heaven-knows-what in Korean characters, but they helpfully gave it the pronounceable moniker for the benefit of the subset of customers who appear to hail from many latitudes of the Americas.

Our goals were, in part, specific: Pocky--a stick-pretzel snack dipped in a variety of flavors, and Ramune sodas, otherwise known as “marble drinks” for the glass marble trapped in the bottle’s narrow neck, over which the drink must flow to reach your mouth.

Things I was surprised by:
Fuji apples the size of softballs. We bought 4.
Durians. I imagined these spiny fruits to be kiwi-sized. They were bigger than footballs. We bought none.
Green bean popsicles. Gabe, deciding they would be perfect for his friend Matt’s birthday, went on to select several accompaniments: A canister of wasabi peas, a can of Grass Jelly Soda (which I can tell you, based on personal experience, is overly sweet Coke with gelatinous blobs floating in it. yum.), and one of the aforementioned gargantalossal apples.

Not surprisingly as these adventures go, Gabe’s science teacher called my Palm Centro as we were contemplating packages of seaweed roughly the size of boogie boards. Seems that Gabe neglected to mention that he needed to bring in $14 for an upcoming science center field trip. So, I am trying to get the gist of this while steering out of the way of shoppers who actually want seaweed*, and Jeff is scrambling to stick a pen and sticky-note in my face in case I need it but I am ignoring it because I’ve determined that I don’t, but am still multi-tasking while on the phone. Which means temporarily disregarding family members. Whose feelings get hurt. Jeff disappears.

You hurt Dad’s feelings, says Olivia.

I was trying to hear Gabe’s teacher, I say.

But this is just like what you always tell me, she says, He doesn’t understand.

So we hope he will not go far, and a short while later, after we’ve snagged shark-themed ice cream bars, Hello Kitty marshmallows, and mango juice, we send Gabe out to find him while we navigate the checkout lane (which is roughly 2 feet wide.)

Olivia exits ahead of me in order to corral her dad and brother, so by the time I push the cart out she has them in line.

Now I am home thinking that we should have bought more in the way of actual food, but noting that one could not identify the components of just any product offered at H Mart, due to the fact that I can’t decipher Asian characters of any sort.

*note to Fred, my brother-in-law, who did actually want seaweed. I got confused in the seaweed aisle. But don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll go back.

jazz man

Jeff bought a trumpet player when he was in Florida. He told me about it, and said he’d arranged to have it shipped here, but that was three weeks ago and I’d been wondering whether I’d gotten the accurate story, or whether details had fallen through the cracks like forgotten phone numbers, or the specifics of how locks are rekeyed.

He came today. In a big old taped up UPS’d box that set the dog berzerk and occupied way too much space on the kitchen floor. I knifed through box #1, then box #2, then finally breached box #3 sans knife after entreating Jeff not to lift anything but the payload out of box #1 lest styrofoam peanuts overrun the house.

He was mummified in plastic wrap and tape, so I carefully clipped him free. I was struck by three things: his lovely face and hands, that he only existed from the waist up, and that parts of what there was of him appeared to have been eaten away by alien flesh-eating nano-bots from outer space.

This was disconcerting and unexpected, but I resolved to focus on the positive space, rather than negative, and we set him on the piano as a sort of traumatized musical muse.

When Olivia got home from track practice we made her look. She gazed in momentary wonderment, then said ”This is relatively disturbing...I mean I like, it, but it reminds me of a horror movie I saw where this woman kills people and turns them into puppets. This part (she said, indicating the roughened, hollowed-out cavity where our trumpeter was missing part of an elbow) reminds me of the inside of one of the victims’ heads.”

Clearly we were in need of another opinion, so we pried Gabe out of the computer room to have a look. ”Heh...” (said Gabe.) ”It looks like something ripped the top half of his body off...cool.”

Nonetheless, he remains on the piano. His face is enchanting, his hands and arms, rippled with the veins of a lean musician, are inviting to caress. Perhaps we will adapt to the missing chunks. I think I can imagine what the artist had in mind. Sometimes a chalk portrait will fade out into jagged edges...and it works in 2D. But in 3...well...there’s a juxtaposition here between photographic realism and abstraction that is simply playing tricks with our imaginations. Still, we do not discriminate here against people who are gradually disappearing, whether it be to nano-bots or to other sorts of degeneration, do we?