He’s Just Like You

An old friend, certainly one of the oldest of mine here in China, came by to visit.  He doesn’t live in Beijing anymore.  He relocated to Hong Kong a few years back.  He'd lived here, indeed here in this compound before I ever did.  It’s hard to remember that there was that initial meeting, when we were strangers.  A woman I worked for said, “Oh, you must meet him.  He’s just like you.”  His wife and I worked in the same department at Motorola.  He worked at HP, which had their tower right next door. And I’d visited him and his wife here in this compound, when my wife and I were still newly married, and their son who is now 6’3’’, was a toddler. 

He was going to be back in town this afternoon.  Would I like to go to his hotel and enjoy the free buffet?  "Why don’t I stop by your place first and then we can go down?" he offered.  I wrote him back and suggested that he come here and stay instead.  I’ll make dinner, we’ll have wine that is better than the free stuff they serve.  And as it turned out each of my gals, both daughters, and my wife, had other plans.  So we had the place to ourselves. 

He spends half of his time these days in East Africa.  The last time we were together we’d talked about the music of the Congo.  He wasn’t familiar with Franco and Tabu Ley Rochereau.  He had business partners and business opportunities in the Congo, but wasn’t familiar with the classic old Zaireoire nor the contemporary stuff like Mbongwana Star.  And we played one track and then another.  The conversation moved up to the Nile to all reading I’d been doing on Egypt.  So I played him some Salah Ragab and dramatically asked him to concentrate on the head of the song "Naveen."

And this needn’t have ended but we hadn’t had much of anything but porcini peppers and peanuts and a glass or three of Tulamore Dew.  “Look, you enjoy the music.  I’ll bike over to the store and grab some groceries and be back back in a flash.  I knew the market here in the compound would already be closed by now and so I went on to the larger store.  I tried to squeeze in that call which was supposed to happen around this time as well, with some people elsewhere in the world, who were just getting up, as I grabbed a pepper, some ravioli and pieces of beef as I chatted.

I made a mess.  Certainly the kitchen looks rough.  “Here, you chop the garlic.”  And the (describe) King mushrooms were a little under cooked.  But it was mostly true to my promotion:  It was better than what they’d serve down at the free buffet.  But by the time he was ready to grab a cab and head off to his hotel, there was a dramatic aftermath to consider.  I did the minimal amount needed to get the food away and saved the rest for tomorrow morning.  In my office, the neat shelf of books which had been arranged in order of what was recently red was now a mad pile.  I should have old friends over more often.  But I’ll reckon with this in the morning.  

Friday, 03/08/19