Skip to main content

Aged Champagne

I am no wine connoisseur and can scarcely tell the difference between the good, the bad and the ugly. When J was born, R (my ex) bought this bottle of Moet Chandon to celebrate the occasion. Just when he was about to uncork, I thought it might be a good idea to preserve this 2001 for a significant milestone in J's life. We were both thinking graduation but wondered if champagnes aged well or could even be kept that long.

However, we stored it away. That bottle of champagne has traveled across continents over the years and is like a talisman for me. R and I have long since parted ways making it a living relic of an antiquated past. Everything that was true of the time when we bought is no longer true.

The definition of a significant milestone has changed too. When the right man comes to stay in my life and R has her first real birthday ensconced by a loving family would be the occasion to celebrate with vintage bubbly. I am happy to know that champagne ages well too. I am sure mine will have nursed as it has been with so much hope, love, loss and pain.

Comments

Priyamvada_K said…
When the right man comes to stay in my life and R has her first real birthday ensconced by a loving family

Don't you think J already has a loving family and her birthdays are just as real?

Do you think the family you have is incomplete somehow? I think the fairy tales we read as children makes some part of us still wait for that knight in shining armor.....

Priya.

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...