Friday

Usual Christmas things were done on that afternoon: opening whatever packages had arrived before the shipping cutoff (last Friday) to Latin podcasts on the MP3 player. Sunshine took the traditional post-feast nap, even without a feast, adding one more nail to the coffin of turkey tryptophan's role in relation to holiday drowsiness.¹ I retired to our local lounge, like normal, for some cappuccino and another seventy pages of my holiday book, the Witches of Eastwick²--I have no tradition of placebo-effected naptime: I haven't eaten a turkey in nineteen years. Being mildly irreverent, and very lazy, I do have a tradition of eating restaurant food instead of cooking big feasts. As an American, that means I have a history of eating exotic immigrant food on bank holidays. The practitioners of eastern religions tend to open their doors on these days. It fit neatly within my tradition, then, to walk across District One to Alibaba, on Lê Thánh Tôn Street, another of Saigon's exceptional Indian restaurants if also the most oddly named. Our Christmas feast was fantastic: rich red chana masala and paneer korma, cheese pakoras, Indian tea, plain yogurt, and more of those whole pinkly marinated shallots served in little bowls as garnish. Outside Alibaba, Sunshine and I found five playing cards on the sidewalk, and carefully kept track of the order in which we picked them up. Rounding out my Jack-Joker-Five were a pair of unsuited Fours, hearts and clubs; whereas the City of Ho Chi Minh drew the Ten hearts, the Five clubs, and the Ace hearts. Any of these cards in a pair-flush will win the hand, as will any merely tripled card. I have no way of determining the odds of these results, but they aren't good. I'll probably win this fourth hand, too. [Cavin]