3/1/2020
When she woke up, she realized she had actually been dreaming of Eggs Benedict. Not just any Benedict, either. The Eggs Benedict from a particular spot in a particular city: the hotel restaurant at the Kimpton-Carlyle in Washington, D.C. in the good ole United States of America. They were the best Eggs Benedict she had ever had. They were the Goldilocks of that popular Sunday brunch food: Not too much hollandaise, but not too little. Eggs poached just right, yolk beautifully runny over some of the best English muffins ever made. A perfect order of Eggs Benedict, good enough to write home about, good enough dream about. And she had.
She had eaten this perfect order of Benedict at the hotel where she was staying, a funky, trendy–but not too trendy– place in Dupont circle. She was staying there on business because it was cheap, or at least cheap for D.C., at only $510.09 a night. That included tax. It was a nice room, not magnificent. It didn’t matter to her because the company was paying for it and the room was certainly good enough for her four-day business trip (with the first day off!). By check out, she would want to complain, but it wasn’t her money so she wouldn’t bother. Plus the complaint couldn’t make a difference because the cause of her complaint wasn’t the hotel itself, but the property next to it, and the construction site which the Kimpton-Carlyle had no control over. But when she was woken in the morning by the sounds of Russian construction workers yelling at each other just outside, she was definitely annoyed. It was 8:00 on a holiday morning (Labor Day, for Pete’s sake!)
The construction workers were just a few feet outside her window, yelling at each other. This on top of the sounds of steel being hammered, steel beams being moved around, workers, two at a time, carrying the beams, shouting. Whether they were Russian or Yugoslavian, she wasn’t sure, since she spoke neither of those languages. She was just guessing. She considered that they might be Russian spies, in fact, because it was during Trump’s presidency. Maybe they were working for Putin, the construction just a ruse. She doubted it, though, since they really did seem like genuine laborers, and it didn’t take much imagination to believe they really were simply laborers laboring and not spies after all. She opened her window, which was within 15 feet of the workers. She shouted out at them, confidently. She could be confident, now that she knew they weren’t spies. “Hey! It’s 8:00 in the morning on a Holiday Monday! Can you keep it down?” The workers with the steel beams yelled to each other, a little more quietly now, communicating in Russian that there was some angry lady yelling from her window. To their credit, right after they yelled at each other for yelling at each other, they were then, in fact, much more quiet. They stopped hammering on the steel beams, stopped yelling at each other. Then they began some other milder, quieter task. Like using a backhoe to move dirt. Ah, the gentle, smoothing sound of the backhoe as it pushed its little piles into bigger ones. This, too, made a second, smoothing, restful sound any time it had to reverse. Beep. Beep. Beep. Whoever the cruel person who had invented the back up sound of back hoes was probably also the sadist who created the bizarre, obnoxious sound of a fax machine.
She got back into bed, lay there for a minute, and pretended to herself that she was going to go back to sleep to the gentle quiet of the backhoe, which was much more quiet than the steel beam striking and the shouting. Still not quiet at all, of course. She never was one to be able to go back to sleep though, even under the best of circumstances, so she sighed, frustrated. Resigned, she gave up on her Labor Day Monday holiday sleep-in. She got up, showered, and dressed. Then she went to the Hotel restaurant. She thought she might as well make the most of it, so she ordered the Eggs Benedict, her favorite. And then the heavens opened and the Goldilocks Benedict changed her life forever. It looked like it could be a great day after all, but now she would have to move to D.C. And except for that, she lived happily ever. The End.
