I miss that stomach that I had back when I was a teenager, the one that could eat Nacho Cheesier Doritos and drink Mountain Dew for breakfast in the back seat of a fifteen-passenger van at the beginning of the drive to a service project. Now I drink a mug of mint hot chocolate (as I just did) and I'm slightly queasy by the end (as I now am). I can pinpoint when it happened: that summer in Liberia. I started the summer with a teenager's impermeable stomach and I ended it with an adult's stomach that prompts that oft-repeated warning, "You'll get sick if you eat all that sugar!" This is, frankly, not true for kids. They can eat all the sugar in the city and still feel fine. I, however, no longer can.
...
My friend R., up from Berkeley, and I walked down to a breakfast place this morning. She had eggs and potatoes with strange spiral fiddlehead ferns (she had heard of them, I had not) and I had a Belgian waffle. We drank coffee and talked about the million things people who were college floor-mates ten years ago have to catch up on. It was sunny when we left and a few blocks later it started hailing on us, although most of the sky was still perfect blue. We laughed at the insanity that is spring in the Pacific Northwest, and stopped at a little store full of items that someone from various parts of Asia might miss if they came to the US: tea bowls, little plastic storage containers, noodles of a million sorts, mochi frozen and not, strips of spiced fish, little pink Hello Kitty purses. I bought incense sticks and she bought mango gummy candy that she passed out to me on the walk home. I tried to eat it slowly, but I ended up chomping it.
...
My friend R., up from Berkeley, and I walked down to a breakfast place this morning. She had eggs and potatoes with strange spiral fiddlehead ferns (she had heard of them, I had not) and I had a Belgian waffle. We drank coffee and talked about the million things people who were college floor-mates ten years ago have to catch up on. It was sunny when we left and a few blocks later it started hailing on us, although most of the sky was still perfect blue. We laughed at the insanity that is spring in the Pacific Northwest, and stopped at a little store full of items that someone from various parts of Asia might miss if they came to the US: tea bowls, little plastic storage containers, noodles of a million sorts, mochi frozen and not, strips of spiced fish, little pink Hello Kitty purses. I bought incense sticks and she bought mango gummy candy that she passed out to me on the walk home. I tried to eat it slowly, but I ended up chomping it.
No comments:
Post a Comment