Sharks

About a couple of days ago, I felt like I didn’t want any of the food that was being prepared at home. Maybe it’s a cardinal rule that one could not eat house food almost all the time, one needs to pleasure the palate with restaurant food once in a while (funny how house food sounds so much like dog food), in order to stifle the numbing effect of gastronomic routine in the house.

So that day, I hopped into my small but compact white car and wandered into town. I was thinking of my favorite Chinese soup in Food Paradise in the middle of downtown area but parking there is such a major hassle that with merely an hour to go before the clock strikes noon, I didn’t had much time to loiter around and be indecisive.

There was this carinderia that was just near our place, in fact not more than a half kilometer in distance and it suddenly came to my mind that there’s an exotic food available there that I thought could sufficiently satisfy my momentary gusto for “outside” food that very time. It’s a food preparation that I am somehow familiar with even from childhood and although it was one food that one does not usually eat on a daily basis, I could recall how I savored it for quite a number of times before. You’d wonder by now what this interesting food is all about and I tell you know, it’s one foodstuff with shark meat curried and spiced-up in rich yellowish soup, and guess what, no vegetables in it.

It is interesting to note that I have two very stark memories from childhood involving this food preparation. When I was so little, like 5 or 6 years old, my grandfather took me marketing in downtown public market and after he bought his sweepstakes at a nearby Chinese store, he took me to an area occupied with makeshift food stalls where the foodstuffs there were presented on a table and one merely has to point to any of them, and one would have it. As my grandfather and me was about to sit down, he told me that we were going to eat shark for that downtown meal. I was suddenly amazed by his pronouncement and I was taken a little bit aback by the idea of eating sharks, since in the movies they eat people instead. But since I was such a small child, I didn’t ask any question anymore and just put morsels of shark meat into my mouth, somehow appreciating it’s spicy and very unique taste.

When I was in highschool, my father took me also to the area with the same proximity as that to where my grandfather had taken me once before and also had told me that he wanted to eat that food with shark meat in it. As we sat down, he tried to waken up some childish amazement in me saying broadly that what we were going to eat were actually sharks, known in movies as ruthless and cruel.

I don’t know why I am narrating this but that one morning when I wanted to eat outside and ended up eating shark meat bathed in yellow sauce, resulted in the onset of particular memories of old. It was a bit uncanny that both my grandfather and my father took me to the same area, to eat the same foodstuff, in instances separated by years, while the conversations involved were so similar and familiar.

I wonder now that perhaps these two very stark memories have some meaning to my present life, now that I suddenly remember them. But I couldn’t fathom the meaning so much and put some connotation to them except that perhaps, they were of a highly unusual occurrence, to ever be in the same situation in two separate instances in the past, like a déjà vu, with two of the most important persons in my life and while both have already gone away from this mortal realm.

Sharks are mean. But scientific studies say they do not actually attack humans unless provoked or has smelt blood from fresh meat in the water. Like what they say of snakes.

I have also read once how shark is one of the few living creatures that have actually been here for a very long period of time, perhaps from the beginning of life, and have largely remain unchanged in form and appearance. Like what I’ve read also about crocodiles and most especially cockroaches.

Sharks have very slender bodily features and could swim with such unmatched agility that their survival schemes are known to be so proficient and stupendous that like what they say about cockroaches, they are bound to survive even a nuclear holocaust.

As shark fins, they are so highly priced by Chinese food patrons and touted to bring good health and longetivity.

This somehow makes me wonder if humans are slowly but surely overpowering the shark population in the seas, that one day, they might just disappear. I hope not.