Anniversary

One month ago I woke on my very first morning in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam--jet lagged enough to rise before eight am, tired from exhaustive flying, and stunned by the town around me. I didn't do much that day. One year ago today, I woke up in Las Vegas, at the usual time, and met my family after their breakfast buffet in the kitschy Luxor Hotel. Seven hours later I was married. Savants reading this column might notice the entries here are predominantly two hundred ninety-nine words (all but about ten of them), but the entry for November nineteenth last year, here, is one of the rare special exceptions, running an even four-fifty. That entry is a ruse. At the time I was preserving our wedding as a public surprise and pretending we were still in México. But I couldn't resist marking the occasion in some way: word count.* Otherwise, the millipede story related there is absolutely true, it just happened a week before I flew to Vegas. At the risk of inaugurating tradition: I would like to tell a story that happened a couple of weeks ago, to publicly mark my anniversary. We'd been walking all day. Down road from my house, about two-and-a-half hours by foot, is Saigon's Chinatown, historically a bustling diaspora before many ethnic Chinese were expelled toward the end of the seventies. The district is still somewhat of a ghost town today, though things are beginning to build back up again. It had been grueling walk, and we hailed a cab to return. That's back-story. There's more: on our flight from Hong Kong, we made friends with out flight attendant who offered us some restaurant recommendations. One place she mentioned was Restaurant Tib, down a string-lighted back alley off Hai Bà Trưng Street, near our house. We had the cabbie take us there; we were tired and traffic-choked enough to spring for a posh restaurant. I had Huế-style fish soup, and it was magnificent. The restaurant was very nice: hardwood paneling in chocolate colors with red silk lanterns and tapestries. Our chopsticks came in matching wooden boxes, "Tib" carved in the lids. At one point, during an intense conversation, a four-inch black millipede fell from the sky and very nearly landed in my soup. It happened so fast Sunshine didn't even see it, and I had to lift the saucer holding my bowl to show it to her. It had curled around into the shape of my food. When it attacked I was ready with a lemon-scented moist towlette, in which I caught the little monster. Then I left him for our unsuspecting waiter. There, exactly four hundred fifty words. Happy Anniversary. [Cavin]