Skip to main content

Changing Pace

Right after work, I went to the Indian grocery store to pick up items I needed to cook for J on her short visit home. She had texted her "requests" earlier in the day and I smiled reading it because there was not thing in there that I did not already know and anticipate. She did add "and anything else" as a placeholder for me to use my imagination.

It is little beyond that for me. I like thinking of food I want to cook for J as receptacle for memories - ones we have from the past and the ones we are now creating. Ten years from now, I would love for her to remember this weekend trip home and ask me to cook a certain dish again. But the perennial favorites cannot be dislodged in the favor of the bold and new. As it goes with comfort food for most people, the dishes she loves the best are rather simple to make. 

The pace of our lives are diverging rapidly - she is picking up speed every day and I am trying not to slow down. Earlier that day, I was talking to C, a woman my age I met a work sometime back. We are both empty-nesters and trying to figure out how to do something different now that we can. It turns out change is scary because it requires moving with a certain speed to land correctly in the changed circumstance. It is easier to stay the course as dull and uninspiring as it might be. The weekend with me imbued with the speed of J's life not mine but it will allow her to slow down a bit, catch her breath before she returns.  

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
5 comments
Read more

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...
111 comments
Read more

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...
6 comments
Read more