Dinner Was Plausible

Up early, and I’m not the only one.  Sleep hit forcefully last evening.  I tried to cut through work after dinner.  Familiar voices calling out from email correspondence.  “Do you want to do that call now?”  No.  I realize its 9:00AM for you, there in New York.  I typed a line and awoke with my thumb on the space bar, the paragraph disrupted. 

It was, after all only a two-meeting day.   Neither of the locations were especially far from home.  Both were close to each other.  There was a lunch, but it was spicy and I didn’t eat much.  There was no beer.  I was home not long after five.  The drive back was to have been a time for reflection; sitting in the back of a cab, knocking off the day’s journal.  Instead, I had a call from a colleague.  The schedule with the visiting executive need to be changed, for the fifth time.  “Let me give you one or two more updates.”  Somehow this took thirty-five minutes. 

I came home to find a dinner preparation, abandoned mid-chop.  There was a bowl of sliced tomatoes.  A smaller bowl of leek rings.  A fatty piece of pork lay, face down, on a plate, by the sink.  Valiantly I tried to overcome my annoyance.  I don’t mind making dinner.  But I don’t enjoy finishing someone else’s dinner plan.  In the sink lay a colander half filled with bean sprouts. 

What to do with all this?  The Mrs. had done as much as she could before she had to run off to something.  I’d need to finish this project.  I considered the meat.  There is a certainly a Chinese word to describe this cut of pork.  In English I’d call it a rectangle of fat, with meat streaks.  This must be what they use to make things like “hong shao rou” which was always said to be the Chairman’s fave.  It’s not the first time I’ve had to take on a cut of pork like this.   I suppose we have to fry it.

Dinner was plausible.  I found a zucchini and some tofu that helped to round out the porcine blobs.  Tomatoes and parsley with the bean sprouts retained a bit of crispness.  We all laughed about what an odd cut of meat that pork had been.   Work then.  And plenty of it.  But my body insisted otherwise.  The work became painful to consider.  “I’m just going to take a catnap.”  Everyone, including myself, knew better.   And everyone else soon made her way up to bed, as well.