The lady in white

Chronicle of Midnight salad follicles?

Midnight walks in a supposed ghetto town like Ypsilanti are unwise and impractical but I simply could not resist stepping outside my cooped apartment. The fragrance of sweet lavender and cherry blossoms drifting in the midnight air was a tempting treat to alleviate my mind and soul. Besides the tempting weather the local Mediterranean restaurant was another prime temptation. I am in love with the Greek salad they serve. But the weather was starting to change colors, there were bolts of lightening playing hide and seek in the placid sky. I braved the prospects of a heavy downpour or even a storm to walk down to one of my favourite joints to relish the salad they serve besides the jolly atmosphere of mama Estella's Greek den. I hurriedly showered, dressed, slipped into a pair of old ballerinas. My old ballerinas are good for a short walk to the bus stop but they are simply a taboo in the name of footwear when it comes to walking a mile. My feet groan and complain of invisible shoe teeth eating and biting my skin at certain places. 




We walked across the campus and much to our chagrin mama Estella's Greek den had shut its business early due to lack of customers in the summer semester. We didn't want our midnight walk to have unappetizing consequences so we decided to go to another eating joint that also served Greek salad. We entered the store, ordered our platter of salad and were staring up at the ceiling since we had nothing to do. My wandering eye saw the cook making our salad with naked hands. It is not the norm to do so. A commercial establishment has some rules and he openly violated them. I had many questions running through my mind. What if he went to the restroom and didn't wash his hands with soap; what if he poked his nose because he had a ruptured capillary in his nasal cavity; what if he ran his hand through his head and wiped a brow of sweat and again wiped himself clean on his aging buttocks; what if..my mind wandered through a long list of questions. The salad finally made it to our table and it was really sweet on part of the owner to give us complimentary bread. The salad looked good too and we dug into the spring, feta and cucumber mix. I was looking for olives and carrots while Rimly was looking for cucumbers on her plate. I made sure that I didn't chase an olive out of my plate and make it unceremoniously land on the floor. Rimly was apprehensive about eating the salad since she came to know that the cook wasn't wearing any glove while making it. As she made her way into the mixture of vegetables she found a lettuce leaf with a black hair sticking to it. It was a fine hair hence it cannot be of the dirtiest order but it was a hair nevertheless. I felt like clearing my guts out and I almost imagined myself projecting an arch of slimy bolus from my mouth and so did she. We called the cook and the owner and showed them the black hair sticking underneath the lettuce leaf. He had a very weird look on his face, wondering how did that fellow get into the salad. I had weird thoughts too since he was an aging guy with a luxurious crop of hair on his ears as well, we almost made them clean some vomit off the floor of their restaurant. We weren't in the mood to fight for our rights, in this case an extra plate of salad , so we didn't raise a hue and cry.


 With a lump of food in our throats we swallowed some soda to wash our food down our throats and made our way back home. But the hair and its source is no longer an enigma, an itch, a cough or a light breeze could have made a weak strand fly from his hairy body onto the salad. It was a good night's walk nevertheless.

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