6. Alive! Atingle! Aglow!
Being really asleep - not the part where you are falling asleep, awakening or dreaming - is like being dead. Unimaginable nothingness. Now, a pleasant aroma starts to intrude Ali's consciousness, bringing her back to life - Bacon frying! She opens eyes and draws back her bunk-bed curtain.
Godfrey, his back to her, is attending to breakfast on the table as he sings:
Nuthin could be finah
Than to be not in Cayrolinah
In the mawnin'
He looks around at the curtain sound.
"You won't mind if I stay in these pajamas?" Ali asks and, at Godfrey's smiling shrug, she gets up and sits at the table. "Wow, Godfrey, you really are Sir Boss here, an't you?"
"Apt allusion, Miss, and I see you admire Mark Twain. Me too."
Ali is referring to Godfrey's being allowed cooking rights in the compartment. The table has an under-panel, which has been slid out doubling its length between the facing seats and leaving just enough space for a person to get to the outside corridor. Godfrey stands frying 3 strips of bacon on a flat portable electric, opposite Ali. The top windows of the compartment are partly open and the fan is on.
Ali watches as the bacon gets fried in its own melted lard and skillfully turned so as to fry each side equally and also pressed frequently by skillet to be sure the raw bacon wrinkles are straightened to get equal frying. In 3 minutes he finishes the bacon and drops 2 crispy bacon strips on a plate, atop a 2-egg sunny-side-up and 1 strip on another plate that has 1 fried egg. A mix of green-white lettuce and red tomato, raw and finely cut, takes up a quarter of each plate and a small brown whole-wheat toast with butter the other quarter. Also on the table are cuplets filled one each with of white vinegar and ketchup
Godfrey takes the plate with the larger portions and puts it by Ali, then places next to it a small-diameter glass of iced orange juice, pours a cup of coffee from nearby Pyrex steaming pot, and adds a small sponge cake tart beside it.
"How come I get the master portion? I'm the small one."
"Because my doctor says I have high blood pressure and to go easy on bacon and eggs." He gathers up the cooking materials in a tray. "I'll bring these back and return in a few minutes. Meanwhile enjoy."
Alone, Ali finds she is hungrier than she thought to be. Before getting on the train, she felt morning nausea and had poor appetite; but now, suddenly, her appetite is back and no nausea. Something to do with the train’s moving vibration, she guesses.
Her Uncle Guy had instilled his atheism in her so no prayer before eats. But he would say, "Eating should be the last thing on your agenda; before starting, first thank the atheist goddess (the term he uses for Nature) for allowing you to be alive, a tingle, aglow in this time of surplus, and also acknowledge with regret the living things that have been destroyed so you may eat them. Do it briefly don't make a show of it, and then enjoy."
She does it. Then she starts by first contemplating for several seconds the spread, herself thinking, Go slow. She reaches back into her shoulder bag and pulls out a pair of chopsticks and a small scissors. Her order of eating will be the solids first and fluids last with the idea that the fluids will clean away solid pieces of food from mouth, windpipe and gullet. At the very end will be a glass of water. Before putting any food in mouth she cuts the lettuce, the tomato and the crispy bacon into small pieces for the chopsticks. That is the advantage of chopsticks over fork and knife. Actually if she did not have scissors, she would use the chopsticks by pinching small pieces off larger parts. Once that is done she eats piece by piece, picking up with chopsticks, dipping lettuce or tomato into vinegar and dipping sunny-side egg piece into ketchup, if she pleases to, and then popping one at a time, bacon too, into mouth and getting maximum pleasure both in immediate taste and in slowing the eating rate.
A light knock with "Godfrey here" and she says "Come in" and he does, sits down across from her and starts his breakfast. He makes no comment about her way of eating. They eat silently.
Brilliant minds think alike, comes to her mind on the coincidence that two seeming strangers on a train should have the same good way of eating.
To continue next, click 13.7. End of the 20th Century Limited Segment
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