No cars today
Share Article Greetings,
Today is Sunday. It is the quiet second day of Chinese New Year.
I pedal my bike into Siem Reap for iced coffee. It's cold and delicious. Men play chess slapping wooden pieces while talking, gesticulating at high decibels. Kick boxers on a screen pummel each other with knees and gloves and violent fury to the endless delight of invisible millions.
Idle men with their backs to the river sit in the shade of empty white tourist vans waiting for business.
I pedal across a bridge over a wide brown river bisecting the town. I go to a car wash business with a small restaurant. I discovered this place one day by chance. The woman owner is pleasant and happy. She has high cheekbones. She is pregnant with her second child. She employes four kitchen kids and six for the car wash.
Her husband is a driver. He sleeps in a green net hammock. His wife plays cards with all the workers. They cannot afford to go home to see family.
Usually the car wash business is busy with two high open raised bays for cars.
Today it is empty. I eat a simple meal of wide egg noodles, carrots, bamboo shoots, pork and eggs.
(Eats, Shoots & Leaves) amphibology—a verbal fallacy arising from an ambiguous grammatical construction.
One car wash boy lays his one white shirt on the rusty brown cement platform. He wears a brown sarong towel. He scrubs the shirt with a bar of soap. He turns on the high pressure car hose blasting white flying soap from the shirt. He rinses it.
He does all his laundry. He walks over to a standing metal rack, shakes out his only best shirt and hangs it up. He carefully adjusts the collar, buttoning the top button. He slaps water out of a yellow t-shirt, small towel, another dark shirt and hangs them.
He owns two pairs of long dark pants. He turns them inside out, putting them on hangers where they will dry quickly in the tropical heat. He disappears behind a green plastic screen to his room for a nap, enjoying his day off. No cars today.
Metta.
