...last month at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:
I'm opening a bottle of wine just as the one (older) (Thai) cook comes out from in back and strolls by with his water bottle to go fill it, and when he sees what I'm doing, he all deadpan non-chalantly puts it down and holds it over like I should go fill it with the wine.
...the other week at the (Thai) restaurant where I work now:
1) My one (Pentecostal) (Guatemalan) coworker was wearing a hat from the local (state) university and a shirt that had something about (California) on it, and so I pointed out to him that he seemed confused, since he was wearing clothing from two different states in the same outfit.
2) A table of four (forgettable) (South Asians) leave $4 on a $67 bill, but a (lackadaisical) (froofy Farrah Fawcett-haired) (black eyeglassed) (late 20s) (South Asian) woman who was very very quiet leaves $5 on her small takeout order.
Also, on another day, a (younger) (South Asian) couple with a small baby with a(n incredibly blocky wedge-shaped head almost exactly like the husband's) comes in and we have to get a high chair out, and the (slim) (ashy-skinned) wife gets soup and says her husband will try some and then maybe he'll get some soup then, which he doesn't but we have to go check about, which then makes me joke that if she gets up, she should be careful because he'll eat all her soup, and their meals have chicken in them which makes me think that they're maybe (Pakistani) or (Bangladeshi), and at one point their baby pokes a hole through his styrofoam cup and so we have to go get a new one for him.
(They left $20 on their modest bill.)
(Not all [South Asians]!)
3) The one (younger) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker reappears and starts working again after I had gotten told it was her last day and she was moving to her uncle's in California, no explanation given for her reappearance.
So, I told her several times "!La perdida ha volvido! ('the lost one has returned!') and "!Nuestra favorida volvio!" ('our favorite returned'), which she liked, especially the latter.
I also told her that the one (Guatemalan) guy who we started the diablo joke about had cried every day after she left, and she was like, really?, like she thought what I was saying was true and I wasn't just kidding.
4) The one (Guatemalan) guy who we started the diablo guy about has been trying to teach me a limited range of greetings in his (native) language, and when I said that I needed to find a grammar book of it, he said that he could get me one, but he'd have to call his friend in (Guatemala), and when I asked him more about it, he said that it was basically what they use to teach it in local schools there, and you could only get it there.
(I told him that that would be awesome, and I'd get it if it wasn't too much, and I'd pay him back for the book and for shipping. I mean, why not get it and d*ck around with the language, if I see native speakers every day!)
...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:
1) After the (husband) boss accidentally added meat to a vegetarian dish and messed up the order when he was helping out in the kitchen for some reason, I grabbed that and ate it as my staff meal for that shift.
And, later, I told my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker, "This is important, to get the boss to like you -- eat his mistakes!".
(She liked that.)
2) There's this one (new) (taller) (Thai) coworker, parts of whose facial structure strangely resembles my one (professor) friend who studies (modern) (Czech) literature, to the point where if I see her out of the corner of my eye at a certain angle, I viscerally confuse them.
And, when I was doing some word searches that my mother cuts out of the newspaper and mails me so that I have something to do during downtime at work, she asked me what it was and I showed her, and she helped me out with the word search.
And, later, I showed her how in that particular puzzle type the leftover letters spell out a word with the same theme.
"Oh!", she was like, and she had this look of just utter pleasure on her face, like that was the best thing ever.
1) I once heard the response "God's going to get you for that," and I was quite taken with it (and why wouldn't you be?!).
2) Way back ages ago at the resthome where I used to work at, the one (older) (West African) lady from (Ghana) was telling me about how she did a big holiday weekend barbecue with all her family and friends, and so I asked her what they made. Basically, it was some kind of spinach dish, and jollof rice, and a bunch of different meat, and that was how they barbecued.
One thing I used to do occasionally with my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker from the resthome where I used to work at is joke that she was a cat burglar art thief who was going to go sneak into museums and pilfer masterworks after she got off of shift.
(For some reason after she changed out of her workclothes at the end of shift and we would all wait for the clock to turn to a certain number so we could clock out, she almost always wore a completely black outfit, like very dark black pants and a tight-fitting very dark long-sleeved t-shirt with a high-ish almost turtleneck-like neck.)
"No, I am going home," she would say to me.
"See, that's your alibi," I would be like, and she would just go "Eh!" and make a swatting gesture with her hand at me.
One time she also broke down her jigsaw puzzle tips for me, on what you do when you're stuck: you have to switch what your eyes see and group by color, or look for very specific edges.
She was very intense and driven like that.
. . .
(Her memory really is a blessing.)
1) Where I live now in the college town that I now live in, I was going to go get my mail from out front and I saw across the street a(n older) (shorter) (fatter) (white) woman with (big) (frizzy) (pulled-back) (grey) hair going up to the steps of the house of the one (aging) (hippie), and so I called out and over and asked her if everything is okay, since I hadn’t seen her in a while.
“She passed in January,” she was like, and she walked over and talked a little, and she said that it was all very sudden and all very odd, she had a spot on her chest that didn’t look like anything, but it had dug in back behind and become sepsis, and there was no going back from that.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I was like, and I said how I had opened a bottle for her once when she saw me out reading and walked up the driveway and asked me to do so – “Thank you for helping her out,” the woman was like – and I said that I hoped that it wasn’t too much pain for her – it wasn’t – and that I always saw people over there and it seemed like she had a good team around her.
“She did,” the woman said, just staring up at me with this broad smiling face, lost in her thoughts.
. . .
2) Right after I moved from the city that I used to live in, I got an email from the one retired school nurse at the resthome, that my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t breathe and went to the doctor’s, and it was pancreatic cancer that had spread and was advanced and was interfering with the musculature around her chest that helps her to breathe.
And, she had said that she had wanted to work as long as she could, but already within a week she was at home, and she wasn’t able to work again but all the workers had taken up a list and gathered money for her and they had sent that along, and of course I said that if they did that again, to let me know, since I’d also send some money, and even if it was going in right away and someone had to contribute money for me and cover me that way, I could send a check or something to them later and pay them back as soon as I could, though no-one ever did.
(I'm not sure if they ever took up another collection.)
Since she also checked and the resthome could forward a card for me, I sent one, something "Thinking of You" and a little lighthearted about how I was doing and how I had heard the news and had thought of her and I think of her every time that I do jigsaw puzzles, since we both liked them and we got yelled at once for doing one in the resthome common room to the point where we did too much of one once one late evening and a resident had noticed the next morning when she got up and so she snitched on us and word got back to the nurse in charge of our unit and she had to say something to everyone, though I think she knew that it was just the two of us.
And, that made me feel better, knowing that I had put that energy out into the universe there at a very, very bad time.
Then, like two months later, the card came back in the mail to me, with a big official and threatening- and definitive-looking bleeding dark red ink mark on its pastel yellow envelope, no known occupant and no known address and that it was unable to be forwarded.
And, immediately I thought that something must have happened with her money and her insurance and her apartment, and she had had to move back to her family village in (Mexico) for end-of-life care or whatever, and that it was a private tragedy that happened quickly and no-one knew of, so of course I said nothing to the retired school nurse or to anyone at all.
Then, a few weeks beyond that, I get another email from the retired school nurse, and it was the news that she had passed, and she knew that week that she was going to pass, so she took the time to cook this special peanut candy for everyone and had sent it in with her (diabetic) (American) husband who she had met through taking care of his mother years ago, though she couldn’t come in person to give the candy to everyone, it was already too late for that.
That was her way of saying goodbye, and, as it turned out, the forwarded card situation had merely been a mistake, fortunately, though I was never able to talk to her again, even though I had reached out, and I really don’t remember the last time that I saw her.
That Thanksgiving when they gave out the turkeys and trimmings to all the staff like they had started to do during the first year of the pandemic, they did so in her memory.
And, that was how she died.
Everyone thinks it was too soon.. . .
