Little Mysteries

Image by Pam Patterson from Pixabay

A Zigzagging Car

When the car in front of you starts to zigzag on the road, you start to wonder why it is doing that. Is it a pothole in the middle of the road that can swallow the front tire? Is it a stray cat? Well, becoming a cat killer is not something you, a cat lover, want to add to your Sunday activities. But you have no time to steer away. Whatever it is, you drive through it and fortunately nothing happens.

Non-Stop Rain

After a whole summer of drought and high temperature, the rain has arrived and it is non-stop raining even if the remnant of Hurricane Ian passed further away last night. And when the rain stops, the mist comes and the air is filled with little droplets. It somehow feels like a monsoon in a subtropical area, although this is not a subtropical area.

My friend L asked if Raritan River, which flows 200 feet away from where I live, one day gets flooded, what we can do. Will an air mattress work like a boat? The kitchen broom can be used as an oar?

A Family Secret

I know M who’s not really a close friend but a very close acquaintance, if “close acquaintance” is a comprehensible phrase. Even if “close acquaintance” is not a real phrase, it should be, especially in a small Asian immigrant community that I am living in right now. Whenever there’s a community that is not large enough to have diversity or a lot of people to allow selective association, one ends up having “close acquaintances” rather than “close friends”. Anyway, M’s husband is on anti-depressant for years and years–he works too hard and is always under pressure. Now when M’s teenage daughter’s teacher suggested that a psychiatrist is probably needed for some symptoms her daughter has, M completely flips out. I really don’t understand why? I mean if M can accept that her husband seeing a psychiatrist and getting his medication, why can’t M accept the fact that her daughter might need that too?

M is a complete mystery to me. M seems to think her daughter doesn’t need it or her daughter is trying to degrade the family’s good name, while at the same time M thinks her husband is seeing a doctor out of necessity because he cannot work without his medication.

Don’t Feel Like Doing It

When you do something you don’t feel like doing, do you praise yourself as being self disciplined, finish it with a sense of duty, and give yourself an imaginary medal? Or do you do it with a disgust and then try to vent your frustrations on people around you or online?

This weekend, I really don’t feel like cooking. I mean I remember how much my mother hated cooking. Actually my father’s second wife (he remarried after my mother died) hated cooking too. Needless to say, the food they cooked tasted like…badly cooked food. My mother’s food looked like some last minute mixtures hastily thrown together by somebody without a single taste bud. My father’s second wife was very dutiful in performing the cooking task, but only to produce a whole table of food that’s completely disagreeable with human palates.

I am saying this without a shred of complaint since I understand how difficult it is for a mother to perform this task every day and how boring it is for most people. Only for those very few who enjoy cooking, it is a pleasure rather than a chore. And I have met such a person. Let’s just say her name is Cari. She really loves cooking and she has used her cooking strategically all her life to get what she wants. And I am going to write about Cari…