great wall 5

 Ever since we almost recruited Free Tim Boxer Dog, I have been watching the comments and we have had two lately.  When you click on New Post you get to a page where you have to hit New Post again to get to where you can post and on that page is a Comments option and you can see the comments and recently we have had two.

Unknown commented on my Uncle Ken's Garden post suggesting that I try popcorn, and sure enough I have thought of growing corn.  Not that I have much chance of getting an ear, but just to watch it grow.  I wonder if the morning glories would twine around it.  I have an ear of popcorn from maybe five years ago hanging in my kitchen cabinets and maybe next year I will chip off a few kernels and see what happens.

Rahul has commented on Beagles' Another Myth Trashed to send it some link about Spanish fly.  The odd thing here is that the post is from five years ago, but the comment was only ten days ago.  He(?) has a link that I was about to click on but the whole thing seems suspicious and I wonder if Rahul is some kind of bot.

I guess The Institute is on the internet and some kind of crazy search might bring it up, but it seems like an odd thing.  When I click on those two guys all I get is that they have no profile whatever that might mean.  

And curiously Beagles himself commented on a post not long ago.  I will leave it to him to explain why he did that and did not just put his comment in the body of his next post.

There is not much to the story of the Beacon guy.  Just a guy who had a talent he did not care about and a high school crush that went nowhere.  Maybe that Beacon routine is the central character of that story,  I have written a extension of the story where he does get Mary O'Connor and the two of them try to climb the showbiz latter together but I am not sure where that is.

I had a friend who had a kind of crush on Sinead O'Connor, and I told him you know she is very pretty, even with that shaved noggin, and sure, she sings like a bird, but if he hooked up with her like as not someday he would be cracking open maybe his tenth beer of the day and she would come around the corner and ask if he didn't think he had already had more than enough beer for the day.  That was on my mind when I was writing Jenn.

And now back to The Great Wall.

The cooks lived upstairs in a honeycomb of shabby little rooms, each one with a bed and a beat up chest of drawers, and most of them a bottle of whiskey standing upright on the floor, and that was pretty much it.

They were newly arrived, fresh off the boat, so they had to go out to the small towns where no reasonable Chinaman wanted to go, to the small rooms in the small restaurants where they never stayed long because surely the next small room in the next small town had to be a little better than this one. They were the last cowboys in America, spreading across and crisscrossing the emptiness, far from the Chinatowns. 

In the Chinatowns, in the big cities, where people spoke their language, where the Chinese newspapers were published, where they could go to a Chinese Opera if they chose to, where there was civilization, none of the restaurants would hire a guy just in from China, because he wouldn’t know how to cook for an American Chinese restaurant, because what they cooked for the Americans was not the food they ate in China.

And the names they took, the names we called them by, weren’t their real names. Leon and Sam, were just American names that sounded like their Chinese names.  That had to be the case with Vincent too, but I liked to think he had gotten it because he was a painter.

He hadn’t been in this country long.  He still didn’t know any English, but he was friendlier than the other cooks who were just passing through the wilderness on their way to civilization and didn’t want to waste time in idle chitchat with the natives along the way.

He had a little studio cleared out of one of the storerooms in the basement under the kitchen where he was painting a floor to ceiling canvas for Leon to hang in the restaurant. 

And as luck would have it, the unopened book that Dawn had hoped to read was an art book.   

When Annette looked down to wet her finger and turn the page I stole Dawn away.  I led her down into the kitchen, past the scowling cooks chopping and slicing, down the stairway to the basement, past rusty cans and dusty jars, and down the dark corridor to Vincent’s studio where I flicked on the light.

What he was painting was a flowery jungle full of striped and spotted animals with a sky of shining birds.  I thought it was something, but I didn’t know much about art, and when Dawn took one look at it and turned around and left, I was bummed. I stood in front of the painting.  Was there something I wasn’t seeing?

But then she came back and she had her art book with her, opened to a painting of a forest full of animals a lot like Vincent’s painting, except that they seemed friendlier.  It was the Peaceable Kingdom she explained, where the lion laid down with the lamb.

“The lion’s not going to eat the lamb?” I asked, dubiously looking into the book.

“Certainly not,” she assured me.

“What’s he going to eat?”

“Hay,” she told me.

“Hey what?”

“No hay, dried grass you know.”

“No lamb chops?”

She looked a little shocked, like when I offered her the vodka upstairs, then she smiled and lectured me, “In the Peaceable Kingdom all the animals eat hay. The hay of the Peaceable Kingdom is very tasty and satisfies everything”

How tasty and satisfying can hay be I wondered, even in the Peaceable Kingdom, but I didn’t see any point in mentioning that now.

Vincent gave us his toothy smile when he returned.  Dawn gushed over his painting, and showed him her book, and the two of them had some little conversation pointing at the picture in the book and at figures in the painting, though of course neither could understand a word each other said, but it seemed liked they understood each other better than I had understood Sam and Leon last night.

Vincent took up his paintbrushes and we started to leave, but then he pointed to a little half sofa in the corner and motioned to us to sit down.

So we sat there watching Vincent paint.  We were pretty close on that little couch and I thought about just stretching out a little and wrapping my arm around her, but it didn’t seem right, didn’t seem like the lion ought to have a hold on the lamb.  Even in the Peaceable Kingdom it seemed like it might make the lamb nervous.

This was nice though, Dawn and myself sitting together watching Vincent paint like we were in our front room watching a TV show.  This is what it would be like in our little love cottage where I’d never see another bloated cigarette floating in last night’s yellowing scotch on the rocks, where we’d dance together to Chinese opera, where I’d kiss an angel every morning, and then Dawn was shaking me awake, time to get ready for the dinner crowd.