Numbing Pepper

Today started out not so good, but turned out pretty well.

I woke up with a feeling of dread although why, I couldn’t tell you. By all rights I should have bounded out of bed and flown to the internet café. I hadn’t seen Gabriel since last week and today was the day we were finally going to connect. That alone should have sent me running out the door, high on anticipation.

What kept me from bounding out of bed was the fact that it was cold. Winter has set her bitter teeth into my part of the world and my apartment has no heat. Mind you I’m not terribly cold; my apartment is well insulated, so the interior temp still hovers in the upper 50’s while outside we dip into the 30’s. And, I have these awesome bed heaters that keep my mattress warm, so I’m sleeping cozily enough. Maybe too cozily. My bed being the warmest place in the house, it does make it kind of hard to want to bound out of it. But my Gabe-Gabe is waiting!

But there’s that feeling of dread, too. I soon found out why.

One of the first things my daughter told me, once I logged in at the café and we started chatting, was that Russ had died on November 28^th.

I have always thought of Russ and his wife as my in-laws, even though my marriage ended years ago and I never acquired a different set of in-laws. Theoretically, once my marriage ended, so should have our relationship. But, through the years our paths kept crossing: visitation with the kids and Jennifer’s marriage, just to name a few. I had a standing invitation to visit them in Minnesota and they had a standing invitation to stay with me in Tennessee. Later, when me and the kids moved to Texas, they had a standing invitation there too, should they feel like driving straight down I35.

In short, we were on good terms other than when I actually divorced their son. Even then Russ never had a bad or unkind word to say to me. Of course he sided with his son – he had to. But I felt he understood my reasons for dissolving the marriage.

Russ was one of the kindest, most honorable men I’ve ever known. Having grown up without a father, I always imagined that my father, indeed every father across the world would or should be just like Russ. Hard-working, dedicated to his family, head over heels in love with his wife, mostly silent, inward-turned type of man with an inexpressible depth of feeling.

One of my most precious memories of him is when he took me with him to the Corner Café. Russ intuited that I did not feel comfortable around his noisy bunch, and he had noticed that my new husband was essentially ignoring me while rediscovering what it felt like to be home after two years in Germany. Oftentimes I would be excluded while the various family members ran around and did what families normally do. Unintentionally excluded, to be sure. That family is what one would call ‘salt of the earth’. It was me who didn’t know how to fit in or how to make my place in the brood. So he would invite me to go to town when he had some errand to run, and we would end up at the café.

We would sit at the bar in companionable silence. He would sip at dollar glasses of beer while I drank watery coffee. The place was nearly empty that time of day. The family homestead was in a tiny farming town in Minnesota after all. All of the citizens of that neck of the woods would be working, for the most part.

After three or four glasses of beer he would ask me if I were ready to head back. While my state of readiness was debatable, nevertheless we would dismount our barstools and go back out to that old, black Ford Granada with red interior and sprung suspension that wheezed and squealed its way home.

To understand why this is such a fond memory, I should tell you what it cost Russ to give up his afternoon nap to go into town. In order to support his seven children he worked two jobs. He would leave early in the mornings and return sometimes only long after the sun had set. Once, when the car had broken down he walked 12 miles home rather than call for a ride and disturb the family. And this was in wintertime, in Minnesota. Come weekends, he was flat exhausted and, more often than not only wanted to sleep during his time off.

Even though I was only in Minnesota a few weeks at a time, and had only been there four times all told, the ritual was always the same. Polka music on the radio, same black Granada with red interior, same two stools at the Corner Café.

I have other memories of Russ. Precious memories, like when he nicknamed my daughter ‘Nose’ – she did inherit the family nose. Or hilarious memories, like when his beloved discovered his stash of pint-sized, empty whiskey bottles in the trunk of the car and started pelting them at him while we – me and all of the younger children playing in the yard ducked and ran, lest her bad aim cause one of us to be hit upside the head with one of the bottles. He never thought of disposing of the bottles by throwing them out the car window. He was far too honorable for that. He didn’t want to throw them in the household garbage because they would surely be discovered. I guess he reasoned the best place for them was the trunk of his car.

There was the time that, me being as tall as I am, had to sit up front in order to accommodate the many siblings in the back seat. When he had to shift gears he would accidentally touch my knee and it became a running joke: Russ was playing with my knee while his wife sat on the other side of me. There was the time he held his grandson – my son, for the first time…

Oh, I could go on and on. And I did, while having dinner with Sam and his wife tonight.

Having only limited time online I didn’t get a chance to express my grief very deeply to Jennifer. And I surely didn’t want to cry in front of Gabriel, at least not much. But, on the long bus ride to meet Sam I started thinking about Russ, my times with that family and how sometimes, our hearts just don’t know goodness while we wallow in it. Sometimes, we only recognize those good times long after they’re past.

It seems to me now that those times in Minnesota, in the company of my in-laws, were some of the finest times in my young life.

And that’s how I summed up my grief when I spilled my tears and tales to Sam and Penny, over a nice hotpot dinner this evening. You’ll remember hotpot from my Chong Qing excursion with Gary and Mask. It seems we ate hotpot every day, except for the day we ate at Snack Street.

Telling Sam and Penny about Russ was cathartic. Interspersed with my tales from Minnesota came the debate of where hotpot originated. I maintain its genesis as Inner Mongolia while Sam contends it is a dish indigenous to the Sichuan Province. We could both be right, but with no internet connection to verify our claims, we’ll just have to leave it as a matter of conjecture… for now, Sam. Only for now.

This hotpot had an ingredient the other hotpots I’ve sampled did not have: numbing pepper. This pepper was allegedly neither spicy hot nor of the sneezing kind you would routinely use to, say, season an omelet or other basic dishes. This pepper actually will numb your mouth. Have you ever heard of such a pepper? I never had…until I bit down on a pepper corn and immediately spit it out. Sam and Penny kind of chuckled at me, and that is when Sam told me about that pepper’s unique property: it numbs your mouth.

Wait a minute, Sam! I have a hair in my mouth. I plucked at my lip, trying in vain to get that hair off my tingling lip. In fact there was no hair, my lip was numb from where the peppercorn had grazed it when I spit it out. Holy Cow! These peppercorns really do numb! I soon realized my tongue was numb too! What a pepper!

What a day! Started chilled and with anticipation at seeing Gabriel, spent with interludes of tears while I recalled fond memories of my times with Russ and ended with a numb mouth.

R.I.P Russ. The world is a lesser place for you not being in it. You are one of the most decent, kind, honorable men I’ve ever met. You will most certainly be missed.

I wish I had some numbing pepper for my heart.