Unintelligible To Anyone Else

 

Your daughter said she wanted Chinese soup.  Yeah?  I was gonna make Indian.  I’ve got the lentils soaking and . . . you don’t want dahl?  OK.  That’s cool.  You're only as good as your last movie.  My wife and I have given up trying to dazzle the other.  This is all about an audience of one.  And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t covet my little one’s ooh when she has some lasagna or nod in affirmation at a taco. 

This soup has lumps of dough that are part of the preparation.  The Mandarin Chinese word for balls, qiu is a homophone for dough and so for as long as I can recall we refer to this by a name unintelligible to anyone else, dough-qiu.  On a good night dough-qiu soup is pretty good.  The flavoring is yummy but I’m just not a fan of wonky dough balls.  Ahh but she cuts eggplant different than the way I do and she seasons it with licorice and anis in a way that tastes like a piece of China I never seem to conger and I heap this dish over my rice. 

There is something between me and an evening of phone calls and emails till my eyes droop.  On Tuesday night we gotta take the garbage up to the top of the hill.  I tow five white kitchen bags from the garbage can in the garage out into the back of the car.  The bottles are in separate bags but these days they don’t actually do anything different in the way they treat the regular garbage and the ‘recycle-able’ as I understand it. 

 

WFMU has some death metal on and I turn it and to NPR which doesn’t hold my attention.  Cars fly by my egress at fifty miles an hour in the dark.  They don’t see me but they see my car, idling.  I try not to make too much noise, filling up the huge containers.  This building off to the side was supposed to be a new church, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anyone worshiping here.

Tuesday 03/23/21