Scenes

"Watch out for the 15," she said, smiling as if she was sharing a vital piece of information.

"The what?" I asked.

"The XXXX 15. We're very food oriented here and if you're not careful, you'll gain a good 10 or 15 pounds."

I'm lucky, I thought. My willpower is hanging in the downstairs closet, shrouded in plastic. March isn't that far away.

She wasn't kidding, though. Our group is very food oriented. Today the entire department went to Chinatown for dim sum at lunch. Three of the women are from Hong Kong and their presence made the dim sum experience entirely new. To them, dim sum was a way to visit home. In lovely sing-song accents, they got us seated, chose dishes from the carts with extreme care, making sure everything we ate was traditional Chinese food. Accordingly, the staff brought out dishes that I'd never seen at dim sum before--for example, a brownish concoction that turned out to be tripe. No, I did not have it. But I wasn't grossed out with it on the table. New is good.

Tonight, all I could think of in savasana was "Open Water," that movie from a few years ago about the couple who got left behind on a diving trip and ended up drowning/getting eaten by sharks. I never saw the movie but the trailers still haunt me.

Walking back to my car, I passed the two men who sit on their porch every night listening to Italian opera and 40s boogie woogie. They seem jovial, of a different time. Tongight they waved.