Meager Memories

Meager Memories

Though many of you believed me dead from an earthquake that occurred some thousand miles away in Xinjiang (ironically: we experienced an earthquake here in Shiyan last week, which we all felt and were anxiously awaiting the inevitable justified phone calls from the states…of which none came), I survived both earthquakes and the meagerness of March. I come to you now full to the brim of stories that I have been holding in my cheeks like a chipmunk anxiously anticipating the moment when I could release my store…enjoy!

Angelyn’s Cat: For weeks we have been plagued with the sounds of a cat so miserably searching for her soul mate that we have all begun to lose our fragile minds. Somehow…this cat got the idea into her poor demented mind that Angelyn is the love of her life. So each morning we awake to her calls, and each evening we go to sleep with her mournful song the last things on our minds. Well, it appears that meagerness drove me to the brink of insanity and so I found myself stalking through the bushes with a sling shot and dried dates in hand – plotting the sinister end of her misery. I thought myself a humanitarian, she needed release that Angelyn could not bring and the only way to ease her spirit would be sweet death. Looking back on that moment, and the photos that prove my madness, I can’t help thinking that there were days in my past where I was more logical/mature/intelligent/choose your adjective…and believed myself to be a pacifist…

Gobbling Goodies: Brian often touts these words of wisdom: Don’t gobble your goodies! Goodies being defined here as the American treats our loving mothers send us throughout the year. We hoard chocolates and coffee bags in our cupboards, trying to make the sweetness last. Well, turns out there is something to be said for gobbling your goodies – as the pantry grew scant we began to open saved goodies in desperate moments. And we learned that if one would only gobble their goodies before the 2 year expiration date, you would not find yourself eating moldy packaged mashed potatoes. You would also be saved the embarrassment of dragging January 2007 Starbucks Coffee beans across town with a note scrawled in Chinese, “Please help these pathetic weiguoren ground their expired, bark-like coffee beans”.

Baseball: From time to time, we foreigners experience a little something the experts call Culture Shock. Symptoms include hatred of pictures that are supposed to be words and the overwhelming desire to punch anyone in the face who has the audacity to say Hello to you. Though Brian and I have both come close in recent months to clothes-lining hello-offenders, we held our arms at our sides, and were finally rewarded when William’s mother brought us two baseballs from America! We took to the school grounds and wacked heads-masquerading-as-baseballs until we felt such delicious relief. Thank the good Lord for the great American sport that is baseball!

LOST & Pizza: There are few things that we foreigners hold sacred here in Shiyan. The first is LOST, the second is arguably pizza. We are a six hour train ride away from a supermarket where you can purchase cheese, so you guess how we crave the gooey deliciousness that is a slice of pizza. I tell you this only so you can consider how serious an offense it would be for any foreigner to eat pizza without inviting another foreigner to join in. While LOST, the addictive television show that is a cult favorite among us, is something that we watch as a family. I do not want to go into detail, or name any offenders, (John, Megan, Andrew, Jaime, William, Priscilla) so I will leave it at these two words, LOST & Pizza, and allow my own memory to conjure up those painful moments where friendships were severed forever.

Liars: We recently celebrated April Fool’s Day…in the span of just a few hours I was told that Hillary Clinton had died, and that Barack Obama had chosen his running mate under my radar… As I was born with more than a shred of intelligence, I will not believe such atrocities. Just as I did not believe these outlandish claims, I would not and will not believe that Beijing creates its own weather, that Chinese babies get mischievous moods and begin winking, and that some dogs pee while doing hand stands (yes, hand – not hind legs). The point here is: Mama didn’t raise no fool.

Wink, wink, nudge, nudge – know what I mean?