My Long Lost Brother

A week or two ago, I took leftover spaghetti sauce to work for lunch. I had no noodles left because I usually only make enough for a single meal; the gluten-free noodles don't hold up very well in the refrigerator. Briefly, I contemplated taking the dry noodles and a small pot to cook them in on the full-sized stove in the break room. I'd never seen anyone cooking anything on that stove, only reheating meals in the five microwave ovens. To my knowledge, I'm the only one who uses the toaster/convection oven (because I don't trust microwave radiation).

I decided the stove was probably there for potluck lunches, and if anyone saw me cooking on it, they'd think I was weird. Had I known everyone better, I wouldn't have cared what they thought. Indeed, at my previous office job, I had occasionally cooked my dinner in a slow cooker under my desk. My coworkers had laughed at my eccentricity and ribbed me mercilessly, but I didn't mind. No one was laughing when the tempting aromas wafted through our quad of cubes and into the surrounding ones. One after another, my coworkers commented on how amazing it smelled. "Yep!" I agreed smugly. "Nope," I replied when they asked for a taste.

After chuckling over those fond memories, I decided I'd better make my noodles on my own stove while I cooked oatmeal for my breakfast. For most of my four years at this job, I've been fully remote, and now I only go to the office on Mondays and Fridays. Therefore, very few people in the office know anything about me, let alone about all of my quirks. I don't know why it should seem weird to cook at work, but I'm too conventional to rock the boat. Today, however, I learned that some people dare to defy cooking conventions. 

Early this morning, a foundation repair crew arrived to lift my sagging garage. The man who knocked on my door asked me to open the garage door so they could access my electricity. I snapped the cover on the cat door leading into the garage and then opened the garage door for them. 

At lunchtime, I saw Arwen hovering near the blocked cat door and decided I'd better bring in the litter box if I didn't want to clean up any messes. I steeled myself for this unpleasant task and stepped through the inner door into the garage. For a moment, I was perplexed when a tantalizing aroma filled my nostrils instead of the litter box stench I'd anticipated. 

"Pardon me," I murmured to a young man standing with his back to me. On the cement floor at his feet was a paper plate with a Ziploc bag full of tortillas. But where was that smell...? As I stepped between him and his lunch paraphernalia on my way to the litter box, my head swiveled at the discovery that the wonderful odor was emanating from a... microwave!

The small, heavy appliance, circa 1980, sat on the floor by the wall, plugged into the surge protector under the light trap for insects. I quickly turned my back to hide my twitching lips. Taking a slow cooker to work on a non-potluck day is one thing. Taking a clunky microwave is another thing entirely! It was an ingenious idea to be sure. Why buy convenience store junk food when you could heat up a home-cooked meal instead? This was just the sort of thing I would do if I only had the guts. 

As I cleaned the litter box, I actually contemplated telling this man, in my halting Spanish, how much I admired his cleverness, and that we surely must be siblings separated at birth. Convention won out, though, and I concluded that the polite thing to do was to pretend I hadn't noticed the humming microwave with its delectable contents. So I pressed my lips together and strode back into the house, carrying the litter box with me.

I was still laughing to myself over the experience when my sister Emily came through the garage door with our sister Amy. "Did you guys see the microwave in the garage?" I asked.

"What??" Emily asked.

"That guy is cooking his lunch in my garage in a microwave he brought with him!" I choked out. "It's smart, I guess. It's just... I've never heard of anyone taking a microwave to work."

"His wife probably cooked his lunch for him," Emily said. "I didn't see it."

"Look," I urged her.

She pulled the door open a crack and then shut it quickly to conceal our peals of laughter. "I saw it!" she hissed.

After she'd gone, I casually returned to the garage, ostensibly to retrieve the pooper scooper that I'd left after dropping one of Macey's deposits from when I'd taken her out at the start of my lunch. Finding the garage empty, I surreptitiously took a photo. You may need to click the picture to enlarge it because I took it from the doorway. I didn't want them to see me through the open garage door and be embarrassed.

The front walk was impassable.

As I laughingly related the whole story to Amy tonight--she hadn't paid attention to our chatter this afternoon--she replied, "That sounds like something you would do, Sarah."

"I know!" I replied. "It's almost like he's my brother or something."