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The day we played hooky from work to hit Santa Cruz, new red bikini purchased and all, was the day it RAINED.
Sort of like on our wedding day.
C’est La Vie. We spent a museum & pasta day instead… which was lovely in a different manner. But I was pretty grumbly about spending yet another day encased in a sweater.
Now it’s 80 degrees and climbing, everyone is sweating like a pig and trying to adjust. I suppose no matter what the weather – we complain. I take my work, a monumental dissertation I am editing for an organizational psych student, and hide in the cave of Cafe Ophelia, and wait to meet my amiga for dinner.
Taiwanese Cafe Ophelia is a total decor scream. If "what not to wear" had a home decor version, this would be it.
It’s half country cottage a la Polo wannabe, half faux euro gold gilt complete with statuettes of people in knickers and goofy hats in mid pirouette or drawing the bow of a violin, and a giant print of 2 Greco-figures huge faces staring at one another in a loving caress. Eeesh. meanwhile the chairs are pale yellow or seafoam green leather and everyone in here speaks Mandarin. It’s all so awful it’s cool, you know? A multi-culti confusion. And they do keep it clean and inviting in it’s odd way.
I’m a stranger in the homeland, in this tiny facade of a piece of Taipei. I can’t read the specials offered only to those literate in Chinese. I can "pass", ask for my seat and my entree in Chinese, but I am most un-smooth & out of date with both the slang names and the formal names of, oh, pretty much everything.
I sit and wait for my amiga whom we introduced to Cafe Ophelia because the food is tasty and also because her darling daughter happens to be named Ophelia.
While reading about organizational change management studies,
and wielding the editor’s pen of doom, I am distracted to realize that a musical rendition of "Sunrise, sunset" is playing amidst the Chinese chatter. They’re playing Fiddler on the Roof at Ophelia? Oy vey.
My head fills in the lyrics I have known by heart from my piano sheet music….
"is this the little girl I carried…is this the little boy at play?"
Lyrics that had me all choked up as I played those keys, back in 4th grade - though I’d never seen the movie and could not quite comprehend what it was that made the music so melancholy.
"Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly flow the days
Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers
Blossoming even as we gaze
Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly fly the years
One season following another
Laden with happiness and tears."
Wow.
I am apparently turning into some kind of softy in my advanced age…if I am this easily verklempt over the very thought of the circles of life. I REALLY won’t have the emotional stamina to hack being a parental unit myself…
Good lord, I have a hard enough time sometimes just being a daughter.
Now here’s the foodie bit. For reasons I am unable to communicate, I am extremely partial to grass jelly. For y’all non-Asians, I don’t mean "grass" the illegal vegetation either.
I’m talking about the black, dark, firm, jell-o from herbal grasses which admittedly doesn’t really taste like anything at all, and is served with sugar water syrup. When we were kids mom would buy a can and the smooth, slippery, dark cylinder would slide out, ridged with can marks. We’d hack it into diagonal slabs with our spoons as she cooked up the sugar water, and we’d go mad waiting for the water and grass jelly to chill in the fridge to the perfect, tasty, cooling treat.
Even my Asian friends don’t know why I like it all that much when there are oh so many much tastier treats to be had rather than this bland, sometimes Chinese medicine-y tasting jiggly goop. Although any chinese medicine doc can tell you it will "cool" the body (alkaline ash) and that I of all people need that!
My first time at Ophelia was for a work meeting. My colleagues, all Taiwanese or HK immigrants a decade or two wiser than I, ordered Hot grass jelly as it was a wintry day. Hot? Wouldn’t the jelly melt into sludge? Curious, I ordered one too. It came not in a drink glass as expected, but in what resembled a tiny white crock pot with a teeny lid. I dug in the big ceramic spoon into the dark blob, and came up with….Muesli?
European cereal/granola? Alas, it was barley, peanuts, red beans, other hearty treats. So. for future reference, when they say "Burnt/simmered grass jelly", they don’t just mean a heated up grass jelly drink, they mean a whole hearty dessert-ish thing that is practically a meal. Probably all your daily fiber allowance to boot.
Today, I asked for a grass jelly, iced.
Assuming I’d get a drink with floating floes of jelly in it such as from Sweetheart cafe. I was delivered a heaping plate of shaved ice, with chopped black jelly drizzled with syrup splayed all over the snowy peak. I pondered how this Himalaya was going to ruin my dinner…and of course ate it anyways. For future reference. If you say the words "ice" and "grass jelly" in the same sentence they may interpret you as requesting a platter of ice and jello large and dark and endless enough to remind one of a sort of gustatory black hole…
So it is that instead of doing my work, I find myself ruminating an inspired treatise on grass jellies of the world and cultural fusion.
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