Cereal Novel: You Elsewhen: Bowl Ten
July 21, 2010 in Blogs
Food. The one word kept being repeated over and over. Food. Gentle hands surrounded you, up-tight and in your personal space so that you just wanted to scream ‘get back’, but the smiles were so determinedly friendly that you could not. Besides, you remembered how freaked out the waitress at Johnny’s Omie had been when you showed her your ‘angry eyes’. No way did you want to do the same to these kindly intentioned folks.
Down a hallway, and up a staircase escalater, narrow for just one person but still surprising. The top opens into a low-walled entry cube with a door three feet high that swings open from your side and closes on the other side with a snap.
Stepping out into a large open space, you see dozens of infants and toddlers who are waking up, mostly with soft cries. Daddies rush to their infants, and lift them to their shoulders with the vast majority of the tykes taking this in stride with smug looks of ‘yeah, I’m the king of the world’ as they sat on Daddy’s shoulder. A few were already giggling as Daddy played games with them that usually involved being tossed skyward.
Seeing one youngun’ float five feet into the air and drop made your heart feel as if it would stop. And then the huge man caught his infant girl with hands like catcher’s mitts, and the girl burst out giggling.
Staring goggle-eyed, you are herded to the side where a line is being formed. Beyond the line are tables with square white boxes on them. Lids are removed and fragrant, warm smells of food steady your heart, and get your stomach grumbling even if the smells seem odd.
Meanwhile, you’re surrounded by motherly sorts. The young girls are against the wall, wallflowers you might say, and the boys are lining up to talk to them. Each boy spending anywhere from a minute to half a minute talking to a girl before the pressure of the line and an occasional catcall forces him to move on.
The men were, there was no other word for it, promenading around the room with their kids on their shoulders. One fellow, his face red, had four kids attached to him. One baby on his shoulder, one toddler on his right, an older girl hanging on his back with her arms about his neck, and another toddler gleefully hanging on to his right leg and using his broad shoe as a seat.
The older men and women stood in the midst of the room and provided part of the watchers along with the women in line who although you cannot understand a single word, the look, the feel, the fabric of the way they move and smile lets you know they are talking to other women about their husbands.
Some things are evidently universal across worlds. If that is what happened to you.
Pork and grape salad is your first choice if the widely grinning ladies ‘soot-eek, soot-eek’ means pig noise. The next is more unequivocal as ‘moor, moor’, but finding the minced and pulverised moo meat amongst the green peppers, green beans, sweet peas, and shalots hurts your eyes. It hurts your tongue too when you realize the green peppers are actually a larger version of jalopeno.
Rice pudding pie with pretzel crust, and chicken minced and pulverized (these people seemed to like to destroy their meat’s texture) with a strong, white cheese powerful enough to ignite your nose hairs mixed together to form a dip for corn chips completed your meal. On the rule that less strange things could be done to a clear soda, you took the ‘Refresher’.
It was very strong ginger ale. Perhaps that is good you decide as you tentatively eat. Ginger is supposed to be settling to the stomach.
Others join you, and begin to help you with the language. And they give you for them a lot of personal space. Which means you only feel quite uncomfortable and not in the lap of those next to you like everyone else around you. With a dozen people squished on to a table that would have held five back home, wherever that is, you wonder why they gave themselves more space while singing.
With signs, you’re able to get your question out. The reply comes the same way with laughs as the signer bangs into the folk on his right, left, and far left. One needs space to breathe to really belt it out when you sing. Food, well, you’re just sitting there. You get the feeling the locals might be more physically vigorous than you are used too.
The assault on your taste buds end, and despite your cleared nose, you feel better, stronger, more fortified.
An older lady and a couple young girls, you think the ones you sat by, take you back down the now reversed escalator, to the great auditorium which now echoed emptily where before the seats had buzzed with the noise, and down into the basement.
The older woman who presses your hand to her heart and says repeatedly ‘Cheyla’ until you say ‘cheyla’ back then releases you. She sends off the young ladies who you rather wish would do the same for you, and pulls open a drawer in the base of the clotheswasher. You had not thought to look for it there.
Inside are squished, air removed clear plastic containers. Opening one, she pulls out a kilt and a shirt, and a pair of socks with some sturdy underpants which are lined with silk. She blushes a little at the last, and so do you.
Cheyla leaves you with a hand wave at the washer and one toward the bathroom. Obviously they would prefer you were cleaner.
M. J. Young said on July 21, 2010
“It was very strong ginger ale.”
This particular statement could be taken in a way I think you did not intend.
“Ginger ale” and “ginger beer” were both alcoholic beverages in the nineteenth century. Then a company called the Canada Bottling Company produced a non-alcoholic “Dry” ginger ale. They marketed it as
Canada (the brand)
Dry Ginger Ale (the type)
But it became
Canada Dry
Ginger Ale
And the company changed its name to accommodate the usage. However, initially “dry ginger ale” was the non-alcoholic type, and when you say that the “ginger ale” was particularly “strong”, that suggests that it is “strong” like “hard” cider.
My read is that you meant that it was heavy on the ginger, not heavy on the ale; but I was still jolted by it.
–M. J. Young
Tadeusz said on July 26, 2010
Indeed, heavy on the ginger.
I’ll see about fixing it tommorrow hopefully.
It would be interesting to take you on in a game of Trivia Pursuit. (smile.)
M. J. Young said on July 27, 2010
I don’t always win (Trivial Pursuit). I’m very weak on sports questions, which make up about half of Sports and Entertainment, and I’m not as strong on science as my wife, who is not too many steps behind me on most other subjects, so we’re well matched for it.
The game that really kills us all is Ubi. We love to play it, because no one is particularly good at it and we at least feel like we’re learning so much. That, perhaps, is one of the influences that helped me understand the Simulationist goal in gameplay: I enjoy learning.
If you’re not familiar with Ubi, from the Latin word for “where”, it is a trivia game played on a map. The four categories are the Americas, Europe, hmmm–can’t think of the third. The fourth is the entire world. Questions are a bit cryptic, but all start with “Ubi” and all answers are a coordinate on a grid of the map of the world–so you might know that Napoleon made his last stand at Waterloo, but can you find Waterloo on a map that has symbols and borders but no labels? You might know that the first nuclear bomb test was on Bikini Atol, but do you know which of those atomic event symbols on small Pacific islands is the right one? It really hones your geography, if you don’t mind committing to several hours of people trying to guess where exactly Custer made his Last Stand and which part of what river sports the Hoover Dam.
The game you might really enjoy playing with me is Malarkey–it’s Fictionary with subject questions instead of words. One player is dealt the true answer and everyone else has to invent something and on a single shot explanation persuade as many others as possible that he has the true one. Great fun for three to six players, and kids are not that disadvantaged.
My favorite trivia game, though, is still Stage II. There are six trivia questions on the card, and if you get an answer correct you get a chip; but the answers are all also related as answers to another question, and the first person to guess the other question gets the pot. Sample, partly pulled from memory and partly reconstructed:
–Type of muckraking journalism: Yellow
–Environmental party in Europe: Green
–Warren Beatty movie about communism: Reds
–The house in which the President lives: White
–Early twentieth century pandemic influenza strain: Spanish
–Vacation island west of the Carolinas: Bermuda
Overall question: Types of Onions.
A lot of fun, requires thinking on two levels at once, and doing so in a shouting race with the other players. Hard to find, though–I think it’s out of print.
–M. J. Young