Noodle Diplomacy

By on December 30, 2022

While serving as director of a semester long China study abroad program in 2004, I happened upon the Longevity Noodles shop.  I discovered the shop while wandering around looking for dinner on my first day in Nanjing that year. I have always been drawn to bas cuisine over haut cuisine and was immediately attracted to this plain, socialist era shop with its promise of tasty and cheap food.  The windows were small and dirty so that I could not quite see inside; a tangle of electrical wiring was affixed directly to the plastered brick exterior walls, one leading to a single hanging bulb to light the entryway. The steam from the giant cauldrons inside vented into the faces of the passersby on the street because that was the most direct route for the exhaust to the outside. The building was all about function and form and whenever I see these conditions, I suppose that the resources go mainly into the food; gritty is ambiance enough for me.

When I entered the shop, I noticed it had all the elements of efficient socialist interior design: stainless-topped counters white tile surrounds.  On adjacent tables, were stacks of identical bowls, but in three sizes––the very same bowls found in most every store and restaurant.  Next to the bowls were rows of stainless-steel containers holding bamboo chopsticks. In two large baskets were piles of blue porcelain spoons––designed to echo Ming Dynasty style.  To the right of the counter was an easel with a chalkboard menu:

Large bowl of beef noodles:             5 Yuan
Medium bowl of beef noodles:        3 Yuan

Small bowl of beef noodles:             2 Yuan

Drinks:                                               Tea (1 Yuan) or Coco Cola (3 Yuan)

 

The dining area was outfitted with about ten large, round tables with ten chairs each and with small pots of chili infused oil to spice the noodles.  These were shared tables, but not communal tables. Strangers sit next to each other without sharing conversation and avoid contact, as if the others were invisible. Chinese do feel compelled to engage in small talk with strangers­­––even with unexpected foreigners.

The shop was not crowded the day I discovered it. In fact, the workers outnumbered the customers, and I had one of the big round tables to myself.  The workers there were mostly middle-aged women dressed in white tunics and white chef caps; their ruddy, sun damaged cheeks betrayed their peasant backgrounds in the provinces. One of the women was making noodles by tossing dough and continuously stretching it and reducing it until it formed long strands.  When the dough took its final shape, the women would set the noodles aside until they were ready to toss in boiling water. Another woman stirred and dispensed the beef broth and beef chucks over the cooked and drained noodles.

Chinese beef noodles are ubiquitous comfort food and variations of the dish are found in most regions in China.  Nanjing beef noodles are not too spicy, but they are intensely flavorful.  The cooks fill sachets with a mix of onions, garlic, peppercorn, bean paste, and ginger root.  The sachet is combined with large chucks of braised beef to simmer for hours in large 30-gallon cauldrons before serving. But the most important ingredient is star of anise and the licorice like aroma filled the air in Longevity Noodles that day.

I ordered my bowl by first going to the booth at the front of the shop where I paid my five Yuan (8o cents) and where a women stamped a white slip of paper with “received,” and––apparently so there would be no mistake about who order it––jotted the word for “Foreigner” on the ticket. Without speaking to me or looking at me she shoved the ticket and a wad of small bills through the small opening in the booth. I sat down at a table ready to experience this delicacy that I had come to enjoy in my years of coming to China.

Despite the nearly empty shop, I waited for almost a half hour for my noodles. I was not surprised at the delay as prompt service is not what one expects in a shop of this type.  Looking out of the dirty window I could see hawkers selling various snacks: steamed buns, fried potstickers, rice gruel, and chicken legs. Longevity Noodles was situated in an alley off Zhujiang Road on the edge of a decaying Nanjing neighborhood. The shop, like the neighborhood, seemed to be struggling to be relevant in the new China, where private enterprise was emerging as a symbol of China’s prosperity.  Many of the buildings surrounding the shop had been razed––not because of an immediate need, but because the buildings represented another time that the government was trying hard to forget. The restaurant was a state-run enterprise of a type that was dying out in China, giving way to small private enterprise with more choice and better service.  The uninspired, dingy décor looked like it had not changed since it was built in the 1960s when most of the neighborhood was built.  The purpose of Chinese state-run enterprises has never been making money, but to employ.  As profit has not been a motive, service has not been part of the plan. But the subsidized product was cheap enough for everyone––when they happened to have it.

Becoming impatient, I tried to get the attention of a waitress who was doing her best to ignore me as she leaned against the wall reading a magazine.  I called out to her, but she acted as if I were not there.  I became bolder and more shouted out Xiaojie ‘Miss’ and she finally sauntered my way.  With a deep sigh, she asked, “What do you want?” as if my order were a mystery. “My beef noodles,” I responded. She walked away without a word. After few minutes she brought me my large bowl of noodles, releasing the bowl about three inches above the table causing the broth to splash over the rim.  She then walked away with a crabby, annoyed look on her face as she discharged her duty.

As I ate my noodles, I enjoyed them even more for their value––80 cents for such a bowl!  They were hot and comforting as the wind blew in through the open storefront, but the waitress’ treatment of me detracted from my experience.  I was accustomed to bad treatment by service people during my years in China, but this time it felt different, and I wanted to fight the system.  My free-market capitalist sensibilities collided with the culture of the restaurant. Cheap or not, I was planning to boycott the shop.  We had no common ground, and I would just go to the newly opened KFC or at least Jimmy Li’s California Noodles. I didn’t care if I had to pay two dollars.

My resolve did not last long. The next day as I was out to find lunch, I passed some pot sticker stands and steam buns vendors but was drawn back to Longevity Noodles.  The pleasant memory of the noodles the day before overcame the residual irritation about the brusque service. After all, I thought, service “is what it is” in China and the most important thing is the food.  I ordered a medium bowl this time. After paying and picking up my ticket, I sat down at a table with a group of three customers, as the shop was filling up for lunchtime. I nodded, not expecting a response; I was a stranger to them with no relationship to respect and no claim on their time or attention.

As I waited, I noticed a woman in a different kind of white uniform and no cap playing Chinese chess with someone who appeared to be a friend instead of a customer. I guessed the woman with the bare head was the manager and thought I would get to know the woman behind the shop. I imagined she would be interested in a Chinese-speaking foreigner with appreciation of her noodles. I approached casually and tried to make conversation with the woman and her friend by asking questions about the rules of the game. They completely ignored me and just slammed down her chess piece as non-verbal emphasis of her disinterest.

 

“Where are you from?”  Giving it another try.

Silence.

“How long has this shop been open?”

Silence again, but with an icy glance this time.

“How long have you been manager?” I asked.

“A long time,” she replied, not looking up.

 

Happy just to move from invisibility, I asked who was winning, but she just talked to her friend.  She then became a challenge to me, and I was determined to become friends with this enigmatic noodler.  Nobody is that unfriendly, I thought. There must be another side to her.  But, of course, she had reason to be annoyed by brazen breech of cultural norms––I as a customer and she the proprietor and roles should respected. She could only give me so much license as a foreigner

I returned to my table to find my bowl of noodles there with chopsticks across the top and a blue spoon next to the bowl.  As I ate, I watched the chess game across the room, thinking of strategies to break into their social circle. My training as a linguistic field worker began to come to the fore.  What techniques might I use to breakdown the natural barriers and find common ground. Besides my place as a foreigner, I was a professor, and she was a worker. The two groups rarely meet in Chinese social circles.

For the next week I went almost every day to the shop, alternating my orders between large, medium, and small bowls, depending on my hunger level.  Despite my frequent visits nobody paid me any attention and the manager and staff barely acknowledged my presence.  My students wanted to know why I kept going to a place where people were so rude to me. “You know this not a healthy relationship!” asserted one student.  I had no rational response, other than I liked the noodles. I felt the need to justify my behavior: “Sure they are rude sometimes, but they make really great food!”  “I think the manger is becoming a bit nicer to me and lately––after all––there’re not too many other noodle shops like this kind anymore.” “These shops will not be around much longer, and I wanted to experience them while I can.”

After a couple more weeks or so frequenting the shop, the manager began to nod to me. Eventually, she greeted me and even asked where I was from.  I was pleased and flattered that she was recognizing me.  She called me “professor,” too, and explained that she had a daughter in a local college. I finally learned her name (Zhang Hongqi or “Zhang Red Flag,” revealing her birth during the politically charged cultural revolution). I called her Zhang Shifu ‘Master Zhang’, the term of endearment and respect in China for people lacking any other title. The next day I went early and asked her to teach me a card game that she often played. We had achieved détente and were moving toward a strategic friendship.

I sat down at Zhang Shifu’s reserved table next to her and between she and her bicycle repair shop friend Wang Xiaoqi (Wang Little Jade).

“What is this card game? Can you show me how to play,” I asked.

“Don’t you play cards in America,” she asked, not answering my question. “It’s called Da Lao Er–– ‘Big Deuce.” “Anyway, we already have four players. You just need to watch.”

It turns out that this was not a game to combine with idle conversation, but to report on scores, punctuated by slapping cards on the table. And this is no place for teacups, but instead for the more utilitarian tea jars with screw on lids that can be refreshed numerous times to extract every bit of flavor from the leaves at the bottom.

During the game I joked with Zhang Shifu, saying that if she were nicer to me, I would introduce more business to her shop.  She responded that she didn’t want more business because it would cut into her card and chess playing time, and that her salary would not increase with more business in any case.

The next morning as I made my way for lunch, I had a plan to teach my socialist noodle maker friend a lesson.  I rounded up all my American study abroad students, including many lower-level students with weak command of the language and released them in the restaurant. Being especially unfamiliar with the culture, these beginning students had more than the typical number of questions for the staff, whose irritation grew with every request for clarification. Trying to decipher the handwritten characters on chalkboard menu, the students asked questions of the manager and the cashier. The staff snapped back at the students in their nearly incomprehensible rural dialect (not at all what the students learned in class).  The students retreated but I urged them back. Some started wandering around the shop talking to bewildered customers in their best effort in Chinese.

“Excuse, miss, do you know how to pay for noodles?” asked one student.

“Please may I bother you to know how to get a clean spoon?” another student pressed a customer.

“Is it OK to drink the soup from the bowl,” asked a second-year student to the waitress.

“However, you want,” The waitress responded with annoyance.

Zhang Shifu was not happy with the confusion and––despite our newfound friendship–––came over to complain.  I told her that if she had been nicer to me that I would not have brought her all this business.  She paused incredulously and then laughed.  From that point on, our relationship was secure.  Humor and cards were my diplomatic tools and gradually. I became accepted as a regular. This was my place. I later carried out linguistic interviews with Zhang Shifu and her bicycle repair shop friend Wang Qiqi and they are now enshrined in my research. Wang Qiqi even broke social convention and tried to make a match between her son and one of my women students. There would be no strategic marriage, but there would be a friendship crossing social class and culture.

 

 

This entry is filed under Essay.

Bad Jobs and Revolutionary Thoughts

By on August 6, 2018

In the Winter of 1981 I had just returned home to Minneapolis from a two-year stint as a volunteer missionary in Hong Kong, full of idealism and a love for my work. I had served in some of the most impoverished areas there and saw many lives transformed, as I learned to exist in a new and wondrous culture. I had “eaten some bitterness,” which the Chinese say is a necessary part of becoming emotionally strong. Not having eaten a lot of anything else for the two years, I had shrunk by more than thirty pounds. I was off to finish the degree in linguistics at the University of Minnesota I had put on hold for volunteer missionary service and I was ready to delve into great ideas again. But, I was self-funded and needed a job. I looked for positions on campus, eager to sign on as a research assistant, teaching assistant, or at least find a position that might compliment my academic training.

It turned out that my skills and professional background were not in as high demand as I imagined. Lowering my expectations, I narrowed my choices to fast food, a parking lot, and an industrial laundry. The parking lot work seemed promising because it would allow me to study on the job when things were quiet. But when the parking lot job fell through I used my connections with my brother to land the job at the aptly named Gross Industrial Laundry. The pay rate of $6.50 per hour–––a decent amount at the time–––and the late hours would not interfere with my classes.

On the strength of my brother’s recommendation, I went to the laundry on a Friday morning to fill out some forms. The following Monday I reported for duty at 10PM and the Assistant Manager gave me my task–––to scrape the ceiling of the massive facility in preparation for its first paint job in 25 years. He gathered a team of custodians to assemble a twenty-foot high scaffold from which I would work. When he could not tell me how long I would be up there, I immediately began thinking about exit strategies. But my brother had helped me get the job and I was afraid to disappoint him. So, I climbed up to the top with my bucket of scrapers and a file for sharpening them when they became too dull. The boss did not want me to waste time going up and down the scaffold every time I needed anything and so I was self-sufficient–––respirator mask, tools, lunch, water, and all.

I had no idea how to do the job or what the quality standard was, so I just lay on my back and started chipping away at the grimy, grey ceiling. The paint–––most likely lead paint as I understand now–––flaked off and stuck to my sweaty face in the heat of the rising steam from the machinery. Nobody below seemed to care about intermittent showers of paint dust. The edges of my dust mask dug into my face and it was hard to breath and to concentrate on my work. The air was replete with a heavy musty smell from the newly disturbed dust that had accumulated over many years on the top of the insulated ceiling pipes. The plywood platform under me had deteriorated from years of exposure to humidity, and delamination formed a wave in the surface of the wood. The resulting bumps caused bruises on my back after a while and I would sometimes get slivers as I slid around to get leverage and position to work. Hour after hour I scraped and days blended together in a pattern of drudgery.

By night a laborer, by day a student, I was enrolled in a physics class taught by an avowed Marxist at the University of Minnesota. He wore a Trotsky-like goatee and liked to wear jeans with his suit jacket. Tenured long before, he spoke only a little about physics, but he did teach Marxist political theory whenever he could. As I listened to him explain the concepts, his ideas began at first to resonate with me. The “proletariat” needed relief and I was thinking about how it might be done. I was sure that I was not a part of the proletariat, but I did sometimes feel like a member of the working class masquerading as an intellectual.

After a while I began to skip breaks with my fellow workers, preferring instead to recover my strength up high. I also worried that my co-workers would find out that I was a university student and that they would resent my aspirations. I had learned from working on construction sites that workers and tradesmen were not always supportive of my college plans, and they would sometimes suggest that I thought myself better than they. It was during those early days that I began to have radical thoughts on economics and political systems. “This was what fomented revolutions,” I thought, exploited workers with no hope of an end to unpleasantness. I remembered shirtless Hong Kong workers in pajama bottoms climbing up and down the bamboo scaffolding as they carried bags of sand to higher building levels to make concrete. I wondered how they endured.

My father was a commercial painter and I grew up working on job sites, doing whatever he told me to do–––picking up trash, cleaning old brushes and spray guns, and doing other character-building tasks that nobody else wanted to do. Being the youngest of three brothers, I was the lowest in the family seniority scheme as well and my brothers secured the better jobs like taping off windows or moving ladders. At my high school people would sometimes ask what my father did for a living. I would say “he is a painter” and they would respond with things like, “Oh, an artist!” or “My mom plays viola in the symphony.” Occasionally, I would elaborate, other times I would say nothing. In their imagination, my French family background seemed to mesh better with art than construction work.

I had done mostly menial and, often unpleasant, jobs in my life. At thirteen years old I illegally worked at vegetable truck farms picking radishes at five cents a bunch. I trimmed Christmas trees in the 100-degree heat of humid Minnesota summers. My resume also included chemically stripping stains from copper panels at a restaurant renovation, and even assembling the kind of scaffolding on which I lay at the laundry. My missionary experience had been hard, but at least it had had a higher purpose.

Each night I took up my place from the last day, scraping away, thinking about the unfairness of life. My best friend on campus had a condo and an allowance paid by his father. I had a laundry connection. I would work past 2AM each night exhausted and numb by the time I returned to my apartment. Gradually I stopped thinking about the cause of social unrest in the working class and had another epiphany: The reason that revolutions were not more common was that potential revolutionaries became too weary and cared more about sleep and food than about abstract ideologies. I also started questioning the bone fides of my radical physics professor when I found out that he grew up in an upper class New York City family and made quite a bit of money teaching me about economic inequality. He had gone to Columbia and then Princeton on full scholarship before taking a job teaching blue-collar kids like me at a state university. During one of his office hours at a local coffee shop, I asked him how wealthy socialists fit in with Marxist theory. With visible irritation, he impatiently repeated his lecture about the role of the rich and of intellectuals in Marxist theory–––that they were a necessary part of the historical dialectic, that the workers were the essential players in the socialist transformation. He was telling me about the romance of the working class, but to me it was not that romantic. I was studying hard so that I could leave that life behind and he gave no indication of a desire to work on job sites. I was the wannabe intellectual and he a would-be laborer.

A few days after the confrontation with my professor I ascended my perch on the scaffold, no apparent end to my task in sight. My back was perpetually stiff and sore. I thought of Michelangelo and what he might have thought as he lay on his back for four years, creating the images on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. I tried to imagine what kind of scaffolding he used. Was there a renaissance-style scaffolding? I imagined Michelangelo to have used something less utilitarian. But if he was inspired, I was decidedly not. This laundry job was not art; I didn’t even get to use a roller –––let alone a brush–––and my work was an act of demolition, not creation. I was the anti-Michelangelo, removing years of filth from this temple of the industrial age in preparation for a fresh coat of green epoxy. I began to be less interested in politics and started to observe laundry life below. Because of the drone of the machines, I wore earplugs, which deadened the noise and sharpened my visual sense. It was like watching a silent movie of an earlier era. Nobody seemed to remember that I was in the air and I became invisible, very much like the fly on the wall.

Over the weeks I learned that one of the custodians liked to take long breaks behind the row of giant dryers. One worker appeared to be drinking something other than water and an Assistant Manager liked to go out to smoke in the cold winter air. His smoking habit was a welcome relief to my existence as it brought in a brisk blast of cool air every time he opened the door. I discovered that from twenty feet in the air a stack of uniforms looked like a leaning tower and that there were many fascinating artifacts from times past lying atop laundry equipment: old dried up shirts, rusty tools, and even some rat skeletons. There were some live rats up there too. As I moved my scaffolding around I found that certain dryers were hotter than others. In some positions I could gaze out through one of a couple grimy skylights, giving me a distorted view of the heavens on cold, clear nights.

I learned that a laundry was governed by a kind of choreography and rhythm as workers moved in cycles from washer, to dryer, to presser, and finally to the rotating central hanger. This dance stopped every two hours, when clusters of red coffee thermoses would suddenly appear everywhere, standing out in vivid contrast against the grey floors below. Workers were in either blue or red, but management wore only black and white, the colors seldom mixing. Sometimes the scene looked like a colorized black and white movie––with artificial, not-quite-natural colors; other times the setting looked more static and more inspiring, like a minimalist Japanese print with a black background and a dramatic splash of color. I was becoming a vulgar art critic and each night I evaluated variations on the themes. This exercise cleared my mind and distracted me from my aches and cynicism. Isolation and rhythm became a comfort.

After three and a half weeks of scraping paint I came down from the scaffolding to find the boss, who said, “You’re done,” though at first I didn’t know what he meant. Done with scraping? Done with work in the laundry generally? I had indeed put my blade to the entire ceiling, but nobody had explained how the ceiling was supposed to look upon completion. There weren’t, as far as I knew, any established standards for laundry ceiling restoration. “It looks good enough and I don’t have any other work for you,” the boss added, and he had the office cut me a final check. I exited the steaming laundry into the bitter Minnesota winter air and headed to the Lake Street White Castle to reward myself with a box of sliders. Watching the late bar crowd stumble in I thought of my intensive mini-course on life during the previous weeks and felt tempered–––no longer so idealistic, but also less cynical.

This entry is filed under Essay, Story.

Irrational Musings on a Mid-Night Nose Bleed

By on August 6, 2018

I rarely get nosebleeds. I have friends who have them frequently and react to them with the same concern as a headache.  I understand the kind that comes from a blow to the face; they are a type of general injury, like a cut. Spontaneous nosebleeds are more disturbing to me because the cause and effect is not clear. It looks like violence without reason.  So when I woke up some months ago at 2AM feeling wetness on face, I was shocked to see myself in the bathroom mirror with my pajamas full of blood.  It was not a few spots of blood on my pajama top, but it looked like an aftermath of a violent attack.

Not wanting to wake my wife, Kathryn, I decided to perform my own triage.  I took my shirt off and set it aside. I tried to remember how people stop nosebleeds; I found some tissue and pinched my nose.  Is it better to use a cotton ball or tissue?  Was it with head down or head back?  It seems like the advice has changed since I was a kid.  I went to the living room (where the floors are bamboo) so I wouldn’t have to worry about blood dripping on the carpet. But as I turned on a lamp, I saw a trail of blood from the bedroom, going from room to room and on both carpet and bamboo. The light switches that I touched were blood stained too.

I found a wooden stool and placed it in the middle of the room, sat down with my head forward and pinched my nose, timing it for the three minutes that I had heard was needed to stop a bloody nose.  I hoped that this would be the end of my situation, but when I released the pinch the accumulated blood flowed out all over the floor.  Because I had to keep one hand on my nose, I couldn’t manage the clean up just then.

I still didn’t want to wake Kathryn; pride got in the way of rational thought and the night distorted my logic.  I regularly pass out when I give blood and this tendency has never gone well with the way I was raised.  I played sports and worked on construction sites, and fainting didn’t fit my secret persona. Men are stoic; they don’t cry in public and they certainly don’t pass out at the sight of a little blood.  But I do pass out and nurses have learned to preemptively lay me down for what is always the inevitable result and they always get the blood in the end.  When I was in junior high school I had a series of tests, including a spinal tap, because of my tendency to lose consciousness around blood. The doctors thought there must be something more to my fainting and that I might have a neurological disorder.

That night I was not passing out; I was too busy solving my dilemma.  How do I get my nose to stop bleeding and clean up the scene? I wondered. I needed a resolution, but didn’t think driving myself to the emergency room in the middle of night would be feasible.  Also, our cars had standard transmissions and I would have to somehow steer with my elbow, holding my nose, and shifting with my right hand. I was still resisting waking Kathryn to admit my predicament, so I turned to the Internet for help instead.

I looked for a second stool and pushed it next to me with my foot, and then put my laptop on it. With my free right hand I opened a browser window and I pecked out the search string “Is it normal to have a bloody nose for an hour?”  I discovered that there was no consensus at all on the question. One blogger mentioned hemophilia and leukemia; another talked about brain tumors.  WebMD was more circumspect.  “There are many causes for nosebleeds, most are not serious.”  Normally, the words “most are not serious” would have comforted me, but it was nearly 3AM in my deadly silent home and I was giving the blogs more due than I would have in the bright light of day.

I searched further and found the venerable Mayo Clinic website.  “If bleeding does not stop after five or ten minutes, try packing your nose with cotton.” What does packing mean?  The site gave no further explanations or links to help clarify the comment.  I did find a YouTube video that looked like it was done in somebody’s kitchen.  I stuffed my right nostril with a cotton ball and pinched.  Five minutes. Ten minutes.

Should I wait for fifteen minutes just to be sure?

 I released. No blood!  Relieved, I began to clean up the scene, but as I bent to pick up a pile of blood soaked tissues, the downward pressure caused my nose to start bleeding again.  Discouraged and worried, I thought of the possible blogger prognoses.

What would be worse, a brain tumor or Leukemia?  Do I have my financial documents in order if this goes really fast?  Does Kathryn know all of my secret passwords?  Oh no, my journal is password protected! My family will never know all of the nice things I thought about them, but didn’t say.

I had never really been seriously sick and was not good at accepting health abnormalities. I did have an emergency appendectomy when I was 35 and I told people it changed my life.  Most thought that an appendectomy was not tragic enough to be transformational and some friends accused me of theatrics.  But I am the antithesis of dramatic by day and in the presence of other people. I am known as the voice of reason in my family and as the one who calms nerves and fixes things.

I needed to calm my nerves and so turned on the television:  Home Shopping Network, LATV-Spanish, and a Perry Mason murder mystery.  Even the Christian Broadcast Networks did not help in my search for distraction as the preacher talked about lepers.  I shouldn’t have dropped cable, I thought. I flipped to an alternative medicine infomercial. They talked about a product with all kinds of benefits, including “supporting good cardiovascular health.”  I looked for an upbeat classic movie and found a western dubbed in Spanish.  Watching a Spanish Clint Eastwood in “Fist Full of Dollars” gave temporary distraction, but the cultural dissonance began to wear on me after a time. It was not the comforting Clint that I knew.

At 4:00AM I was still bleeding off and on. I decided to try a double nostril pack for extra pressure, and this time for twenty minutes for good measure.  Still no luck. The Mayo Clinic site said it may take multiple attempts to stop the bleeding.  Another twenty minutes. Breathlessly (really breathlessly) I released the pinch on my nose.  No blood!  I positioned myself over the wastebasket that I had set up for the used tissues and carefully removed the cotton from my nose. Still good.  My spirits buoyed, I now felt that I would at least make it to a dignified visit with my doctor.

 4:45AM and finally the situation was coming to an end.  Squatting like a weightlifter keeping my head level, I removed the blood from the floor. I began to clean as if I was scouring a violent crime scene. I don’t want Kathryn and the girls to be shocked when they wake up, I thought.

 I sprayed the light switches and the counters with household cleaner, removing the evidence of the night’s ordeal.  I packed up a bag full of tissues and cotton balls and put them in the trash. I changed into clean pajamas and put all my blood stained garments in a tub to soak in the laundry room. I carefully lay down on my back in bed so that I would not traumatize my nose and start bleeding again.

Although I had lost a number of people close to me, including my parents early in my life, I had never thought much about my own mortality.  Now in that surreal moment in the early morning hours I could think of nothing else.  Is a person less likely to die if he is awake or asleep?  Maybe I should bump Kathryn so that she will wake up.  That would break the spell and keep me going until daylight.  I began to identify with children who think that keeping on the lights will keep away monsters.  I wasn’t worrying about monsters, but I was fighting my own sort of demons.  Artificial light gave only artificial hope and I wanted to see the sun, I drifted to sleep and woke at dawn while my wife was getting up. I felt my face.  No blood.

“How did you sleep?” Kathryn asked.

“Fine,” I replied.

“Can you take Sara to school?  She asked.“OK” I said.

“I have some things soaking in the laundry tub.  Would you mind putting them in the wash?  On cold cycle,” I continued thinking about a “cleaning anything” blog that I read a few hours before.

“Anything wrong?” Kathryn asked, sensing feebleness in my voice.

“No, I am fine,” talking myself back into normalcy. “I will be home a little late–– around six.”

Should I make a doctor appointment?  I wondered.

No, everything is fine. 

 

November 28, 2013

This entry is filed under Essay, Uncategorized.