through the darkness toward home
Yesterday was a good day. Woke up at the college crack of dawn and got into a space-age car with three of my very favorite people on the planet and drove to St. Paul. There, J and K went off in search of sun while T and I went into the conference building and got our thankfully typed and semi-professional looking name tags. After catching the last half of the keynote, we went to a surprisingly robust and awesome lunch, sat in the back of the room because the caterers had told us to, talked about life after undergrad, and later wound our way through the maze of tables in search of cake and pie.
The room I presented in was wee, and even once T smuggled J and K in, there were still only nine people. But the two woman who were presenting in the same hour were funny and informal, and helped to steady my nerves. As I was reading the paper, all of the nerves seemed to knock loose some of the junk that been gunking up my nose for the past two weeks, and T told me after I was done that she almost just threw a packet of Kleenexes at me, but J said that he didn’t even notice. Which is not terribly reassuring because J notices very little. Got some very nice feedback, both from the audience and my co-presenters, and a hug from T for which I was grateful. One women seemed to be having trouble believing that I was an undergraduate, which I thought was really cool. She told me I should publish what I’d read, and considering I’d written over half of it two days before, that was also cool. The paper was about something about which I’m passionate, and it’s nice to hear that the work I’ve done is good and worthwhile.
K and J went in search of more sun while T and I went to a panel about online writing centers. Felt very smart when I caught the Stephen North references, even though he’s pretty much the god of writing center theory. The people from Walden University–an exclusively online college–were funny and realistic about the often enfuriating and thankless work that writing tutors do. Before, one of the Walden guys saw our name tags and said that he was an alumni, and T asked if he meant alumus, which is the masculine singular of the word, and when he blinked and twisted his face a bit, she told him that she’d lived with a classics major and was a Latin geek and sorry.
After finding J and K out in the sun reading comic books, conferenced-out, we motored over to what would be my first visit to an Asian grocery. Inside, there were aisles and aisles of stuff I’d never even heard of before, tanks full of live lobsters and clams, and a heated glass case with whole roasted ducks hanging in it. As J said of them, “They’ve still got faces.” Walking away from the meat counter, upon which was a massive television tuned to the Travel channel (something unsettling about a butcher watching a documentary about baby deer while slicing up…something), I purused the fish counter only to see a small man hack at a large fish with a machete, dump the pieces into a plastic bag with some water, tie it off, and hand it to a waiting family. At the front of the store were bags of rice as big as bags of water softener salt.
From there, we found Malaysian food. J got a mountain of tofu, T a plate full of spicy lamb, K a heap of spicy noodles, and me a load of chicken served in half a pineapple. I tried a bit of a green chili and my mouth burned for fifteen minutes, and T explained that, yes, they get much hotter. J poked around K’s plate of noodles, stabbed a black jiggly thing and said, “I don’t know what this is, but I’m gonna eat it.” Only after did T explain that it was a mushroom. We shared everything, including a strawberry smoothy with giant tapioca seeds at the bottom, and paid our tabs.
Stopped a co-op where T bought a bag of kumquats and J bought wax for his soon-to-be dreadlocks. I’d never had a kumquat before–they’re the size of cherry tomatoes but look like oranges–but, holy crap, are they good. Taste explosion. Everyone should find some immediately. You eat them whole, rind and all. The fruit is shockingly sour and awesome, and as you chew, the rind becomes sweet. I think they just may be the perfect fruit.
From there, drove through the darkness toward home listening to cd after cd, T always having something new and awesome to share with us.
Driving across the world into the ripening sunset, I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
