Abandoned roads - Jos Lammers

y now, almost familiar Chinese woman pushing an iron
cart full of nondefinable plastic items across the sloping
paving stones.
Yesterday evening, when I sat in the park after dinner
amongst biking, jogging, playing and eating people
from the neighborhood working on my notes about the
world of before, she sat next to me. Out of her oversized
iron shopping cart, from underneath her cargo of battered
PET-bottles and empty cans, a choice of excellent food
arose. With a plastic knife and fork and a napkin on her
lap she first ate a more than half full tray of noodles,
then from the next tray about three quarters of a fried
chicken, after that a plastic cup full of rice and for desert
a slice of strawberry pie, still fresh and unharmed
in its original supermarket wrapping. As soon as she had
eaten enough of each of these courses, she scattered the
leftovers over her shoulder in a small flowerbed behind
the bench where we were sitting. The birds and squirrels
apparently knew the ritual and hopped into their places
as soon as she pulled the first tray out of her cart. ‘What a
day for a daydream’, someone a few benches further down
played on a saxophone. Two boys rode their skateboards
to the sound.
I stayed for about another week in my grandmother’s
apartment. During the day I did chores for the ‘housemother’
in the ashram and asked the ‘general secretary’,
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