Sushi

“It’s ah-mazing the way this place has changed over the last fifteen years.”

“More traffic, more expensive, you mean?”

”That too, but I meant people. DIFFERENT people. I buy my veges at a Chinese market, bread from a Greek bakery next door, and the tiler coming this afternoon is Croatian.”

“You know, I was at Pak N Sav yesterday, I’m at the checkout and this woman behind me, think she was Samoan, she asks the checkout lady about a bottle and some rice she’s holding, ‘Is this what you use for making SUSHI?” And the checkout lady says, “I wouldn’t know, I’m from SYRIA, do I LOOK like I’m from Vietnam?”

“VIETNAM?”

“Yes, so I go, ‘Excuse ME, sushi is I THINK Japanese.’ And the lady is holding a bottle of MIRIN, can you believe, and get this…”

“I can guess, Long grain.”

“Ping pong. Long grain rice. Anyway, we get her all fixed up with some glutinous short grain and rice vinegar and soy sauce and tell her not to make sushi like the Koreans do.”

“Woo hoo!”

The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples. Walter Lippman 1889-1974.

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