Spent the afternoon with my favorite colleague from work. His wife just had a baby.
Me: She had it in the car, you say?
Him: Yeah. Right where you’re sitting.
Me: Heh.
Him: Is it dry yet?
We visited his wife at the hospital and saw the baby. They also had pictures, of the car parked at an angle in the entrance of the hospital, passenger door open, midwife pointing at the passenger seat where the big event had taken place. Another picture of the seat itself, a bloody towel and a pair of women’s shoes on the floor.
Later we had lunch, spareribs. I ate so many I couldn’t eat any dinner. I was so full of meat, I woke up at midnight and couldn’t fall back to sleep until three AM. Our lunch conversation went like this:
Him: She pulled her pants down at the light. I looked over and saw the top of the baby’s head sticking out. Which sauce do you prefer, the piquant sauce or the garlic sauce?
Me: The piquant sauce. The garlic sauce is a little, I dunno, noncommittal.
Him: And of course, blood and everything all over.
Me: Check please.
Milan Kundera: There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
Bouncer: [Frog-marches Kundera through restaurant, forcibly ejects him] And stay out.
In other news, coldest day of the entire winter so far today. And Brian made me cry at work. And Novala nearly did too. It’s just the mood I’m in today.
kiss that bouncer for me, would you?
eurgh. only parents who have already gone through the process would be able to eat spare ribs and have a conversation about that….
Oh, that pushy, intrusive Kundera. Here I am, cuddled up on a snow day, reading my Dorothy L. Sayers, and he bursts in with his “A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality. Blah blah blah.”
And stay out!
Sorry, dude.
That’s okay, Brian. I do it too, do something with my kid, go on a date or build an igloo, and part of me wonders how this will be remembered.