Went very LATE to Adams-Morgan, hoping to find my falafal place open, but it closed at 2;30AM, seems (I arrived 20 min. or so after that). So I went to one of your Jumbo Pizza places, naturally -- and the guy remembered me! I mean, I asked if perchance he could come up with an anchovy pizza. Sez he,
"Didn't you ask me that the last time you were here?"
"I might have -- I haven't been here for a long time . . . "
"You would be in, with one of the ladies, yes? I told you we were out of anchovies at the moment, but we'd have them when you came next."
"I've been out of the country since January! So you really can make an anchovy pizza? . . . "
-- or something like that. This is the guy who is from Pakistan (though I would not have guessed it either from his looks or from his accent & manner of speech; my guess would be MAYBE Persian -- but he speaks in a rather streetwise / old-world [like old Chicago, old New Jersey, or I don't know what! -- more like a James Cagney movie maybe] manner). He said he was a seaman for 3 years in his early 20s -- somehow that may explain it, hard to say.
I also gave him a few spare Chinese / Hong Kong / Indian currency notes, as he said he's a collector. And told him I'll see him again in a year if not sooner. :-)
He also told me that Ustad Bismillah Khan passed away 2 days ago . . .
He said the [Urdu] prose memorializing the musician (in some media broadcast) was so fine, he was jotting down some of its words....
Then of course he invoked the name of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan . . .
yours truly &c.
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dear ____,
continuing my mini-tradition of cannibalizing email for sake of personal blogging, I went and blogged the just-now-mentioned anchovy pizza anecdote. And added on a bit of extra stuff from a different email to a different party. :-)
Life is too short to write everything again from scratch.
cheers,
d.i.
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