Skip to main content

Greek Dinner

Met H for dinner after a decade a few days ago and got to experience that same inner brightness that I had always known her for. No amount of adversity can take that away from her and she has experienced more than most people ever will. She was married to the love of her life but the man suffered from an illness that decayed him slowly and there were any number of medical emergencies over the forty years of their marriage.

 When she finally lost him she would only talk about how well-loved she had always been and how he always had surprises that warmed her heart. I have stayed in touch with H over the years because she shows me how to age with grace, turn adversity into a source of energy to pour into people and things you love. I learn just by watching her and hope that in time learn to be something close to the person she is.

The evening will now be a memory of H across the table at the Greek restaurant at across the street from my hotel. Her laugh as the waiter encouraged us to try a liqueur he uses to glaze his onions to make them smell of licorice. It is not a smell you would imagine to be compatible with onion but it works really well. Such is also the the lessons learned from observing how H has lived her life - things that you cannot imagine would work out well for a person end up being ideal. You just need to have her amazing spirit

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

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

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