One day, with time to spare and my hiking boots on… I was walking around Boston and stumbled upon the gateway to Chinatown! hungry and with only a fist full of dollars, I began to search for something to eat. With my options waning I found myself wandering down a narrow alleyway, until I encountered a diminutive elder from the community.
In the decades since this unusual day; I believe that my recollection of the ancient man with the wisp of a mustache has changed. Yet, still, I will attempt to tell the tale.
I believe that the gate to Chinatown faces south; so it was northward through the noisy, dirty, pedestrian strewn streets that I straggled. I recall somehow not quite finding a restaurant and recollect that the cultural differences were profound. No automobiles or busses. I simply recall a leftward turn down an alley where I began to walk west and took a few steps until I found the man.
My memory, as I have stated, is decades past. Yet, I recall the dirty grey streets and the curb. There was a darkened doorway which here I might recall to have lacked an actual door, and further that there may have been a curtain across that threshold that had been pulled to the side.
Then, this ancient Chinese king fu master of an unknown form of that art seemed to welcome me to be seated there with him by his wok. And, he served me three dumplings. I believe that they were primarily vegetarian and that the oil that they had been cooked in seemed cheap, dirty, and well worn. I regret now referring to my lunch as having been the day I ate three dirty dumplings in Chinatown; yet, dirty the dumplings were, in fact, filthy.
I can’t digress now into the story of the Idaho bus station cheeseburger… yet perhaps others have seen their BMI waste from seven to three such that finding three dumplings can be understood as undeniably an experience of divinity.
Durham wheat is now pouring into China as ramen noodles and the “Asian” pasta of some Marco Polo futuristic sci-fi gets to hinterlands where the RR GMO sequences of grain propagules invade in the way that the Chinese Emerald Ash Borer now threatens the American Ash and MLB lumber.
A note to the Ghillie clad… it is perhaps not camouflage to camouflage oneself as the foliage and detritus. Herbivory doesn’t appear on the streets. And, I suppose it excessive to delve here into diversities of epidermal and retinal pigmentation versus thaose similar typifications in places where boxers are shunned as they always have been.
Suffice to say that the world order is changing from the rhetoric of domain disputes and class warfare which entrenched itself in juxtaposition to Brandenburg before that wall burst.
I, as for myself, like Psalm 23. I have certainly wandered in our USA. That I felt so alone remains a query for an infinite modality and for specific externalized points which at times I have deciphered. To think that in the maelstrom mine I have been led and taught is a blessing I choose to believe in.
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