I’m having soup for lunch today.
I purchased it from the Staff Restaurant at Feng Shui Bank (which, in my father’s day, would have been called a Canteen, but which is now - as with most things in modern life - branded, and titled something poncey like “The Place.”)
It’s Thai Beef an Noodle soup, and it’s really quite good. So good, in fact, that it makes me think I don’t have soup often enough. In fact, when did I last have soup for lunch? And then, as I slurp up a long strand of thick spaghetti-like noodle, I remember…
I remember the last time I had a waterproof carton of soup. It was a spaghetti and Meatball soup, and I was still slurping the spaghetti off of the spoon as I stood in front of the TV in my old bank - CBM, if you recall - slurping, and frowning and wondering how on earth what I was watching on TV could possibly be real, as the second plane crashed into the second tower, and the world altered forever.
I think, when the first bodies started falling, when, onscreen, the ash started to descend, I put the soup down.
And here I am, falling back into the past with a noodley soup, an increased awareness of all the things lost and gone forever, and a heart that, lately, has become a little too -overfond of reminiscing.