The Hot & Sour soup had no business being that good. It was unfair to the ingredients.
It was my first night back in Seattle, and I wandered into some random, red, dingy, hole-in-the-wall Chinese joint, and expected only a cup of soup. Instead, an older, stressed Asian woman in a weathered apron presented me with a tiny bowl of molten emotions.
The first spoonful detonated. Sour. Heat. Salt. Pepper. All of it arriving at once.
It was like getting punched directly in the mouth with flavor. An assault on the tongue’s senses.
I stopped talking. Mainly, because I couldn’t anymore.
Another taste.
Good Lord! What are you doing to me, man?
Then came the pork fried rice. The fragrance of a thousand angels belching in your immediate direction, all at once.
Then the first bite…. which ultimately broke me!
Whatever goodwill remained after the soup, was completely obliterated by a bowl of fried rice so good it should have its own variety TV show. I stared at it, took another bite and felt my eyes suddenly begin to fill.
I was actually crying at the table.
I was actually crying at the table. Unexpectedly. For no immediately known reason. Over pork fried rice.
Truth be told. I didn’t give one single damn about it either.
The meal was expensive, as is everything in Seattle. I would have willingly paid triple and left a piece of my heart as gratuity.
Flashback. One year earlier, I had made almost this exact same trip to Seattle for my son’s martial arts tournament, three days after my father died.
I didn’t cry then. I couldn’t.
That Seattle was gray. Not the city. But me on the inside. The color of numbness.
Seattle had no clue my father was gone. Why would it?
The city kept right on being Seattle. People walked. Restaurants hummed. Ferries weightlessly surfed the waves in the bay. Tourists wandered around buying things they had no real use for.
The blend of multiple mother tongues filling the air as prominently as the breeze off the water.
My son had a tournament then too. Life had apparently neglected to consult me, before continuing on. Somehow, I managed to bear with it.
I boarded the plane. I walked around Seattle. I ate the food. I watched my son compete. I think I was there. There are pictures and Facebook posts proving that I was.
But emotionally, I might as well have been tagged, x-rayed and checked in with the luggage. I remember the numbness more than the vacation itself.
My father was a chef. He owned seafood restaurants. He was legendary!
Food was never just something for when you were hungry. Food was work. It was art, it was identity. Food was creativity. Food was family.
Then family was gone.
Three days later, I was clueless in Seattle. No sound. No tears. Nothing.
Then, a year passed before my eye could finish its previous blink.
Seattle called us back for the same tournament. Same city. Same location. Same father watching his son compete.
Yet, I was repurposed into a different man.
My son didn’t win this year. He did, however, deliver a random side kick to another kid’s head that nearly landed the other boy in the business end of Puget Sound. That was cool!
WHACK! The sound of what an ankle bone colliding with soft tissue under a padded helmet sounds like, when it does its best to stem the tide of every pound pressing down per square inch.
For one magnificent instant, winning was irrelevant.
I was there. Really there.
I heard it. I felt it. I laughed. I watched my son brawl. And I soaked in every ridiculous second of it.
My newly restored ability to feel things had no volume control. Everything was cranked up to 11. Like the morning drive DJ, crackling on the radio, yelling at me to tune it in and rip the knob off!
I did indeed rip it up. Especially the local cuisine. Dad would have gone round for round with me, every bite matching mine. An ironman chewing contest with no defined winner.
After the Chinese food crashed through this unrealized, emotional barricade that I had spent the previous year hiding behind, the seafood swam through the opening in a way that would have Michael Phelps doing double-takes.
There was chowder.
Then there was more chowder.
In case I didn’t mention it, there was chowder.
At some point, there was enough seafood chowder inside me that Greenpeace was picketing along the pier, protesting my personal poaching of the local wildlife. As usual, I didn’t care! Why yes, I’ll have another!
Seafood was everywhere, and I attacked it with the enthusiasm of a man showing the local Orcas how it’s done. Like a squid with endless arms, grabbing everything in its path, leaving a trail of ink-laden destruction anywhere I went.
And somewhere in all of it, was Dad. Not like the year before.
Last year, his absence swallowed everything around me, in the way that a black hole makes quick work of galaxies. But this year, memories of him pulled up a chair and sat at the table next to me and enjoyed the entire meal in the ether between us.
He had cooked seafood professionally. He had built businesses and legacies around it. He understood what food does to people, long before I had a son of my own, as I sat there gobsmacked, getting emotionally mogged by a plate of pork fried rice.
Maybe that is why the food hit me so hard?
Or…maybe grief follows its own itinerary.
Or…maybe grief follows its own itinerary.
It doesn’t obey calendars or timelines. It doesn’t punch timecards. It doesn’t politely announce that seatbelts must be fastened and that turbulence is ahead.
Sometimes it just goes quiet. An underwater type of quiet, where it’s all muffled and distorted. And truthfully, that’s ok.
Recovery sneaked into a random, red-hued, Chinese restaurant wearing a fake mustache and glasses, and hid behind a miniscule cup of hot soup.
I cried plenty in the single year between those trips. But these tears were different.
These weren’t tears because something had been taken away. They came because something had returned.
Taste. Enjoyment. Presence. Feeling.
The ability to sit beside my son, eat something spectacular and recognize, live in real-time, that life was pretty good at certain moments. That realization landed harder than my son’s side kick.
One year earlier, my father died and the tears just wouldn’t drop. One year later, pork fried rice obliterated the floodgates.
Seattle hadn’t changed. It was me who changed.
Somewhere between the grief, the plane ride, karate kicks, Hot & Sour soup and enough seafood chowder to trigger environmental warnings, the world had gotten its flavor back.
And damn, I was hungry.