Deejay

I shared a desk with a woman named Kemi for 11 months in 2016. Same desk. Different shifts. I came in at 8am and left at 5pm. She came in at 3pm and left at midnight. We never worked the same hours once. But we shared the same drawer, the same cracked monitor, the same chipped mug she left behind one evening with a Post-it that said don't use this one. I used it every single day. We started leaving notes. Not intentional at first. I'd leave a note about a file she needed. She'd reply at the bottom of the same paper. Then the notes got longer. She had small tight handwriting that slanted left. I have big sprawling letters that take up too much space. The page always looked like an argument between 2 different personalities that somehow agreed on everything. I'd come in every morning and go straight to the desk. Not to start work. To look for the note. Before emails. Before anything. She wrote about everything. A bus conductor who sang instead of shouting at passengers. Her neighbor's goat that escaped twice in one week. Her father back in Ondo who called every Sunday and spent 20 minutes complaining about the same politician he had been complaining about since 2009. She wrote the way some people talk. Like she trusted you completely before she could explain why. I wrote back. About my commute. The woman on my street who had been building the same house for 9 years. My mother's laugh. Small things. The kind of things you tell someone when you've stopped being careful with them without noticing. Month 5 I came in and she had left jollof rice in a small cooler next to the monitor. Post-it on top. You said yesterday was rough. Eat before you start. I hadn't left a note about that. I had said it quietly to myself at the desk and apparently said it out loud without knowing. She heard it through 3pm the next day and still made the rice. I ate it at my desk that morning and felt something I couldn't name. Like being looked after by someone who wasn't even in the building. Month 11 the company restructured. Her shift moved to a different floor. It happened fast the way things happen in Lagos. One week she was there. Next week a stranger sat across from me who put nothing on the desk and left no notes and made the whole space feel like a waiting room nobody wanted to be in. I should have gotten her number but I didn't. 4 years passed and I stopped expecting to find the note. Last November a friend dropped a link in our work group chat. Small food blog. Brand new. First post was about jollof rice. Not a recipe. A feeling. About how her mother made it every Saturday morning in Ondo and how the smell of it is still the fastest way she knows to travel home without moving. I read it standing in my kitchen at 10pm. Then I read the second post. About a bus conductor she once saw singing instead of shouting on a Lagos bus. About how everyone on board went soft without realizing it. I knew before I scrolled to the name at the bottom. I DM'd the blog at 11pm. She replied at 11:08. Said she recognized my name immediately. Said she still had one of the notes I left. The one where I wrote about my mother's laugh. Said she kept it because it was the most honest thing anyone had put in front of her in years and she didn't know what to do with it so she just held onto it. I held my phone for a long time without responding. We had lunch that Saturday. Buka in Yaba. She walked in looking exactly like someone who would leave jollof rice next to a work monitor with a Post-it and no further explanation. 3 hours. We talked for 3 hours. Before she left she said she used to come in at 3pm and go straight to the desk before she did anything else. Just to read what I'd left. I told her I did the same thing every morning. Neither of us said anything for a moment. She smiled and said she knew. We're having lunch again this Saturday. I'm bringing the chipped mug.

🤣🤣🤣Good one.

Donald Trump turns 80 in June, A historic moment. He be the first president whose age exceeds his IQ.

"Will urge scientific community to consider if Mahakaal Standard Time can replace GMT." - Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan in Ujjain

No rehearsals, no warm ups, 74 year old and still sound amazing. That's talent at its best. ❤️ Music is the closest thing we have to a time machine.

You’re not stupid! You just have bad luck when you’re thinking.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” —George Carlin

Curiosity is stronger than love. A reporter asked him, “How so?” “I’m 94 years old, and I got married at 23. But at 46, my wife left me. She told me that she had become invisible now… that I was working too much and I wasn’t paying enough attention to her anymore. I told her that it wasn’t possible, that I loved her more than everything, and it was true but… that’s when she asked me: do you know when was the last time you came to see me play bridge? I didn’t know how to answer, and she said… ‘It’s normal. You never came.’ And she left. So I made a decision… In the months that followed, I signed up for bridge lessons and… I learned how to play, I practiced, I researched, and one day… I saw there was going to be a tournament near our home. So I signed up and… She was in the other team. I was seeing her for the first time in nearly a year… Of course, she beat me. But I saw a feeling in her eyes that I hadn’t seen for a long time. Gratitude. So at the end, I went to see her and I told her… ‘If you agree to give me a second chance, I’ll never miss any of your competitions again.’ I kept my word. She passed away 8 years ago but… She taught me the most precious of the lessons: “Love isn’t enough, you have to know how to show it.”

There are no words.

My wife was going through her wardrobe last night. She said, "Look at this, it still fits me after 25 years!" I said, "It's a scarf." The doctor says my left jaw will heal, but I will most definitely lose vision in my right eye.

26-year-old Billy Joel performing "Piano Man" in 1976. One of the greatest songs ever written.