No One Ever Asked

I can’t remember the tastes of last evening.  But I can see the remains today.  There are many dishes of food that still need to be put away.  It’s early before I start to clean up I have a call with a company from Brazil.  They want to work with enterprise in China who are interested in acculturating to Brazil.  It isn’t the morning after Thanksgiving in Sao Paulo.  It doesn’t take long and soon I’m back to considering the aftermath of yesterday. 

There’s a small plate of turkey left.  But where’s the carcass?  For a moment I’m afraid my wife has thrown it out but soon, I’ve found the tray with considerably more uneaten turkey out on the porch.  Stripping the remaining pieces of meat off to make a commanding pile.  The bones all go into the largest cauldron I have.  No one in my family ever used to make soup the morning after Thanksgiving.  It was working at Telephia in 2003 or so in San Francisco and a Chinese American colleague went on and on about how his grandmother made “jook” with the turkey bones every Thanksgiving.  I did it once that year and have done it every year since.  My wife hated this process and insisted it made the house smell bad, until one year a few years back, she suddenly decided turkey soup was a good thing.  We’ll have some broth soon.

The best meal at Thanksgiving is the turkey sandwich the day after.  There are two English Muffins in the back of the fridge, and I pull them and the mustard out and get to work building a teetering pile of white meat that I press down between the muffins and the lettuce.  A particular taste and a particular set of memories.  The left over sweet potato’s and the big dish of wild rice will need to be disposed of.  Looking over the table I consider what else might be saved and enjoyed by people later.  There’s the vegan dish I made.  I’d imagined asking people to guess the ingredients at the time but I never did and no one ever asked.

Later I need to mail something off to Hong Kong and head down to the local post office to do so.  First, I checked on line.  “We’re open!”  I grab a priority mail envelope and begin to fill it out in line.  But they want sixty dollars to mail a form letter across the sea.  I ask for the cheaper service that gets there a bit later.  That’s fine.  But the gentleman behind the counter has a great deal of difficulty entering a foreign address into the system.  “It requires a zipcode.”  “Yes.  I see.  But Hong Kong doesn’t have zip codes, I'm afraid.”  “It doesn’t?”  “No it’s a rather small place."  He calls his manager over.  She confirms that he just needs to reboot the system.  It takes a while.  Subtly I perceive that the man does not want me to think he isn’t an international fella.  I think of the term “going-postal” and smile and try to restrain anything other than oozing empathy.  But it does suggest that Americans mailing things to places other than the United States from this particular postal outpost are very, very rare occurrences.

Friday, 11/29/19