Tuesday, September 27, 2011

The Habits I will have to unlearn

Imagine this:
I wake up late on a Monday for my normal American 9-5 job because I failed to be jolted awake at five a.m. from a mill grinding soybeans outside my window. I throw on some clothes I wore yesterday and don’t worry about taking a shower or even looking in the mirror. I run out to my bus stop and wait for the bus to arrive, and I wave it down. I ask the driver the price to get to my destination.
“$1.50 ma’am” he replies.
“What? That’s too much!” I insist. “Pardon!” I say clapping the backs of my hands together in the style of a beggar. “I want the real price, not the ‘white person price’”, I argue.
He stays firm with his original price, not willing to bargain, and I relent and get on the bus. I announce “good morning” to all of the passengers on the bus. I sit uncomfortably close to the person next to me and nod off, falling asleep on her shoulder. I jolt awake and see a bagel shop I’d like to stop at before I go to work.
“Driver, I’m getting off here,” I yell to the front of the bus. He ignores me, so I get off at the next stop. Before getting off the bus, I wish all the passengers a good journey. When I arrive at the bagel shop I walk up the counter to give my order. But before ordering my poppy seed bagel with plain cream cheese and a tall boy to boot, I ask the lady at the counter a few nice questions-
“How did you sleep?”
“How is your family?”
“How is your work?”
“How is your health?”
I am surprised by her abrupt answers and eagerness to get my order and move on to the next customer. I go to the next counter to pay. There’s a basket of bananas by the checkout counter. I pick one up and ask the cashier, “Present?” thinking that after spending so much money at his establishment I deserved a little something extra.
I go to sit down and eat, but before I bite into my bagel I announce to the room full of strangers, just to be nice, “Let’s eat!” offering everyone the opportunity to join in to eat my breakfast with me. I spot a toddler in the table next to me with his mom and I pick him up and put him in my lap and start playing with him. I give him a piece of candy from my bag and then give him back to his mom.
“Good Morning, I like your earrings”, I say. “You must give them to me.”
When I’m done eating, I leave the bagel shop and I spot a co-worker across the street. I hiss loudly at her, to get her attention and call her over. She comes to meet me and we start walking towards work together. She reveals a bottle of moonshine she had made over the weekend and suggests we go to the park and sit under a tree and drink a bit. I agree and we have a few shots- for the health. The conversation varies between talking about how fat each other has gotten to how much we paid for everything we’re wearing. I tell her I want to go to her house tonight for her to make me dinner. Then it starts to rain. We certainly couldn’t walk to work in the rain, so we stay under the tree a little longer, drinking a bit more, till it lets up.
Finally, when the rain stops we decide to head to work. I arrive to a very disgruntled boss and five people waiting for me to start a meeting we had scheduled the week before.
“Why are you late?” he asks.
I look at the clock on the wall; my cell was broken so I didn’t know the time. I realize it’s an hour and a half past the time I was supposed to arrive at work. I just shrug at my boss and pull out my million-dollar excuse, which works like a charm.
“C’est temps Africain”