Thanksgiving 2005: Now with Eighty Percent More Tinfoil Hats
I fell asleep at 1 a.m. to a stopped-up toilet. I woke up at 5:00 a.m. to a stopped-up son.Synchronicity, if you will, although I'm not sure Jung ever used a plunger.
If you think that was a lead, you're wrong. It bears absolutely no relation to our Thanksgiving. In fact, nothing in the known world bears any relation to our Thanksgiving, and therein lies the tale.
If you'll remember, we had two neighbors from Taiwan--Andy and Doris--who were delightfully friendly and spoke almost no English. Perfect neighbors, to my way of thinking. Andy provided engineering support for a Taiwanese firm to a local manufacturing company. When his work visa expired, he left, and another employee of the same firm replaced him. The new guy also moved into the same house next door.
Well, with Thanksgiving coming up, we both thought it would be nice to invite him for dinner, since he's here by himself (his wife is still in Taiwan) and probably had nowhere to go on the holiday. I'd spoken to him at length at the Halloween cul-de-sac party, and he was a very nice guy who seemed to be very interested in technology. He also speaks English much better than Andy--well enough to have reasonably decent conversations.
So he came over at 1 p.m., and I was expecting an afternoon of talking about the newest gadgets and tech. Which we did talk about, for a while. Then Gloria came in and told us that dinner was almost ready.
"Do you prefer white meat or dark meat?" Gloria asked.
"I don't drink alcohol," he said.
And then the plot took an unexpected twist.
Eli was looking at a book about dinosaurs. "What do you think about the idea that people lived at the same time as dinosaurs?" He asked.
Uh-oh. My Batshit Insane Alarm goes off.
"I'd like to see lots and lots of evidence of that," I said.
"There is a site in China where dinosaur fossils and human bones were found together," he said.
Red alert! We're blowing the hatch!
I found out in the next half hour that an atomic reactor had been found in Africa which was millions of years old, and that there was a passage in the Bible about destruction with a word which, when translated into Ukrainian, meant "Chernobyl."
I'm going off the rails on a crazy train.
For dessert, we were eating chocolate-pumpkin pie, and he said: "I am always interested in learning new things. For example, did you know that there is much evidence that there were many Garden of Edens, and that Adam and Eve were space aliens?"
"This is delicious pie," I said.
"This is responsible for evolution," he said.
"I mean it," I said. "This pie is just great."
"The outer space version of the devil ruled the garden where Adam and Eve lived, and he tempted Eve to breed with humans. Adam was angry when he found out, but then he thought he would like to get a little bit of that, too."
"I'd like to get a little more of this pie," I said. "Honey, can I have some more pie?"
Gloria went off to the kitchen, and I excused myself and followed her. Then I whispered into her ear, "Help me fake my own death."
If this had been a person who spoke English as their native language, I would have been incredibly annoyed. Somehow, though, with his slightly fractured English and winning smile, it was highly entertaining.
And I am always interested in learning new things.
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