The bright lights of the Shawarma Palace

Mrs. Ottawacker has gone. She has left me. I am alone, bereft. Well, it might only be for the weekend, and I might have actually had to drive her to her brother’s place so they could head up to Sundridge for two days, there to work on getting their father’s home up to scratch so it can be sold, but you get the point. And, I am not really alone, as I have Ottawacker Jr. with me, but the point stands. Pity me. I am as the Lonely Mountain.
 
Being abandoned, albeit just for the weekend, does cause one to question one’s very existence. Not least when Ottawacker Jr. mentions that he is hungry and what am I going to do about it? In cases like this, it is wise to branch out and experiment, especially with the keeper of the purse strings sitting in her brother’s car and being driven at 120 km/hour in the opposite direction. Occasionally, I like to essay a somewhat munificent approach to life. Tonight was one of those times. So when Ottawacker Jr. raises questions about being fed, I know exactly what to do. “Boy,” I said. “Do I ever a have a treat for you? We are going to the Shawarma Palace.”
 
The Shawarma Palace is something of an institution and, I have to say, something of a licence to print cash. It is wildly popular in Ottawa (admittedly, with nothing else to act as competition, even hot dog vendors can strike it rich) and people come from far and wide to eat in or order out. The food is excellent – and is Lebanese in style. We arrived at around 6pm, and there was already a good queue. But it is worth waiting for. You stand in line and shuffle forward until you reach the front counter, where you are faced by six men, all dressed in black. There, you give your order: a man takes your order, then piles as much food into a large container as it is possible to get. He puts in rice and fried, cubed potatoes, salad and hummus, pickles and spices, beef or chicken, covers it with a number of sauces (tahini, sour cream, sesame), tries desperately to close the box, then outs it into a bag and adds in a number of pita breads for effect. Then you pay a large fee – like $23 or something – but you don’t care, because your eyes are stuck in the wide-open mode they achieved from watching the man behind the counter put so much food into your take-away box – and then you are out. But, as you leave the restaurant, you notice that the people who ordered their food to eat in are hidden behind massive plates of the same sort of food, plates that are perhaps twice as big as the box you have in your hands, and you contemplate for a second going back and complaining about it, then you realise that there is no way that you will ever finish what you have in your box and you come to your senses. Then you drive home, entrusting the box (and another one) to the boy in the seat next to you. Both of you are driven wild by the smell – even you, who has no sense of smell, because the smell is like miasma, it crawls up inside your brain and starts asking why you are not eating, what is wrong with you? And you get home, and you run to the table and start eating, getting up after a few minutes to close the front door or get a knife and fork and perhaps a plate and a serviette. The you get a quarter of the way through and realise you can eat no more – possibly ever. So, you close the box (still with difficulty) and put it in the fridge, then you move (with equal difficulty) to the sofa and collapse upon it. There you stay for an hour or so, until the phone rings. It is your wife, still driving with her brother on the road to Sundridge. You chat. “What did you do for dinner?” she asks.
 
“We just boiled an egg,” I said.