Hamlet Must Have Been

Call’s started at 3:00AM and went back to back till about 6:30AM when I tried a person in India, only to find out that I’d gauged the Indian on-the-half-hour time zone wrong.  My little one and I sat at the top of the driveway by 6:50AM.  At that hour she is even more reserved than usual and unless we talk about her favorite pop group there is little point in discussing the classes scheduled for the day ahead or much of anything else.

Her bus is there in five minutes time, just as it ought to be and I bid her well and wave to the driver as Shifting the gear, I turn the radio back up to audible.  The Clay Pigeon on the Wake-and-Bake show has a notably funny, subdued voice and he is always on WoofMoo at this hour.  He finds news stories that are actually worth listening to when he isn't playing "Sweet Leaf."  Had I been listening to NPR, I wouldn’t have found out that a group of macaques have overrun a village somewhere, terrorizing the locals.

My call with India goes well, sitting there in my car, that is warm by now.  It’s sufficiently comfortable that I decide to take a second call there as well.  There is no possibility I’d wake anyone up sitting here, developing a marketing plan, sipping on my coffee that is no longer warm. 

I was certain I as going to make pizza today but my little one texted her mom from school and asked for 炸酱面: zhajiangmian. All these years and I’d thought it was a jia and not a zha.  It helps to be literate.  That’s all my wife needed to hear was a request for food from the motherland and soon she is chopping away at the rou xianr to cover the noodles with.  I enjoy the dish every once-and-a-while, but to my ears, in the moment it sounds rather rich and starchy.  (Not at all like a pizza . . .)  

I’d a good long bike ride that took me home into the early night fall, so I’ll have worked up an appetite.  On the way home I decided to make my way along Huguenot Street, which I always knew was there but hadn’t really considered anew in the last few months.  The are many more noteworthy buildings than I’d remembered.  The sign outside suggests that The Deyo House was built in 1692.  I stood there and thought about the contemporaneous reign of Kangxi on the other side of the earth and what this little hamlet must have been like three hundred and thirty some years ago.

Tuesday 01/14/20