The Moo Shu Man
I’m in limbo at the moment — most of us are. The pandemic has strangled my business. My Dad died, and I can’t visit my Mom. I’ve finished my current novel, and it’s stuck in a review queue with TPTB. I check my email more than I should.
The one thing I still have some control over is riding my bike off road, deep into the national forest. My husband gave me a full suspension Norco for our anniversary, and for the first time in my life, I beat him to the trail junction. I was ecstatic.
And then I waited, and I waited, and I waited some more. I started to get worried when it struck me: of course — he’s the Moo Shu Man.
“Yeah,” a friend told me even before I met John, “it’s like when you order out Chinese, and you’re hungry but it’s taking a while, so you get really worried, and you obsess over every sound outside. Is that him? Is he here yet?”
That, she said, was what it was like to be single, waiting to meet someone.
“And then the driver pulls up,” she said. “And you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, of course he’s the one. I knew that. He’s here already? Of course.’”
John was the Moo Shu Man, always late but perfectly on time.
And eventually as I stood there in the forest, now twenty years after we married, he pulled up on his bike, grinning and proud of me for beating him, and utterly unaware that I had been worried.
So here I sit now at my desk, waiting, grinding through another day, and trying not to jump at every electronic ding or check my email at 3 a.m., because when the Moo Shu gets here, it will be perfectly delicious and perfectly on time.