Quickly, If You Would

Woke up with no time for anything.  These days its rare to stay out till two in the morning.  The place I’d been chatting in had bar food, but I’d avoided it at the time and I was hungry when I left.  Piling out into the corner east Jianguomen and Da Wang West Road at 2:00AM there was fortunately plenty of street activity.  I called an Uber and agreed to meet the guy up by the corner.  In the time it took to order the cab I was in the middle of my next order with a jianbing guozi.  “Quickly, if you would ma’am.  My car is coming.”   This morning I was reminded of my midnight snack as seemingly all of my clothes were covered in sticky jianbing flakes.

I picked up my coat and tried halfheartedly to sweep some of the flakes off.  They weren’t impressed.  I noticed that last night’s shirt and the pants I’d laid beneath them were swarmed with flakes.  I flicked a few more times and noticed the flakes were all landing on the floor.  I lifted the shirt and it smelled like a cigar.  Had I really had a cigar last night?  I dropped the shirt, repulsed.  I gave up.  It all seemed like too big an undertaking at that time of the morning.  I went to get a grapefruit juice. 

Reconstructing the day now I remember taking the little one to a basketball tournament and finally reaching someone in the their U.S. night for a quick and productive call.  Soon I was helping my wife with a class she runs.   First espresso in hand, I was trying to explain resurrection and pagan antecedents and how it all related to eggs and chocolate and rabbits to a group of impassive seven year-olds.  We weren’t connecting.  I switched from English to Chinese and this helped.  Then, plucking from one of the vaguely Easter themed books we had there that I’d piled up to show them, I opened up “Horton Hatches the Egg.”

Thank goodness for Dr. Seus and his flamboyant illustrations and mnemonic patterns.  Soon every kid was repeating: “I meant what I said and I said what I meant.  An elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent.”  Later when kids began to paint the eggs we considered whether or not their might be elephant birds inside. There was only one young boy in the group.  He looked bored.  I told him to sneak out with me.  I introduced him to an old American tradition I’d just invented called throw the hard boiled egg against the wall.   This was the most fun either of us had had all day.