How do you say "So Fetch" in French?

Amma and Chelli

(Grandson) Rise!

My dad mimicking At's hair :)

Defiant hair runs in the family…

(I'd be ok if 

At didn't inherit 

the ear hair though.)

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This is a morning

Painted with the colors of my childhood
a door swings, calls my childhood name
the stairs lift me as did mother and father
the breeze, their blessing calling me home

_

Look me in the eye!

This picture cracks me up.

(Scout & Grandpa R)

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For Amma

Mother, my diameter
I am yours, your radius.

Gambling into leaf too early
the crocuses are betrayed
frayed on drifts of winter,
sleet, and no daisies
at our feet

All weekend long,

Toronto's lonely songs

their Omni and just me

the same Hindi movies

this time I see alone

Bound to you. Only you.
But found by everyone.

_

So Sari

Unusually for me, I turned up to work in a sari. ( A special sari that my Chelli gave me back in May last year!)

 I took an accidental selfie while I was documenting student PowerPoints, and so I even have proof.

Thanks for the sari, Chells!!

_

Amma

Called Amma to find out that she'd been sick and feverish for two days.

Sick since she got home from Benares; since she bathed in the Ganges with its famed sin-eliminating waters and decomposing corpses downstream.

She said she only meant to take a token dip but ended up doing nine. She said she swallowed some of the water.

In the last month two childhood friends have told me that their mothers died--one six years ago and C did not make it back to the funeral, the other one month ago on account of which S wasn't celebrating her birthday this month. I loved these "Aunties"--I loved their food, their style, their staunch support of their daughters. I yearn for a chance to tell them this.

I wonder when I'll see my own Amma again.

The kids called Amma this morning to yell "Get well soon, Ammama."

It's only been two months since I was in India.


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Once, twice

Your place is inside someone.
the closing of their heart
a landscape scaled to story

what if you knew everything
About why my sister looks like
my sister, the slap of silence;

the beating that is the phone ringing
The lament of memory in all
the half-remembered childhoods

what if those habits are only errands
dead from scorn; like butter asking
to be left out, sleepy in the sunlight

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Ginger + Garlic

Knowing I have two jars in the fridge plus the curry powder mom made in the coffee grinder = two nights of easy curry anytime I want...


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Spin

Yesterday, after I'd dropped the kids off at school and was driving home to work at syllabi and class prep, I ran over a squirrel. I've braked-swerved-stopped for the suicidal little creatures before and would have this time, except that this one leapt out of the undergrowth before I could harness a reaction. Serves me right. I should have biked/walked the kids. I felt the thunk of its body under the wheel and could see its inert form lying an inch or so from the edge of the road. I felt miserable.

I called my mother.

She was horrified. And suggested that to make up for taking a life, I should scatter grain in the garden for other squirrels to eat.

I'm such a bad person, that all I could think of was--but I'm not the one who eats meat! 

_

Happy Birthday, Baby A!

Back

Fair, hostile sky
grumble of wind

music wakes up,

miscommunicates

an umbrella of rain
splinters of silence

In the cramped cage
of childhood

My mothers already
see everything

_

New Bike Summer

Race, Class, and Gender

There's a lot of yammering about race, class, and gender in most of my classes, but that didn't stop me from being surprised by stuff people I really like have said lately. Friend X and I were talking about some other random stuff when he said:

Your parents must respect you because you married a white guy. 

It bugged me immediately that he would think that
(a) Race: Marrying a white person (like him!) is means of obtaining respect? And we're not talking people who might find me less alien because I happen to be married to one of their own. We're talking about respect from my own parents!
(b) Gender: Marrying "well" is the only way to earn my parents' respect?

I was fuming so I went home and told my mom, who proceeded to unleash the class bomb:

Nevermind, she said. Forget it. What does he know? He doesn't even have a good education, he's just a shopkeeper.

Mortifying.

_

Beloved Grandson

Lucky Granddaughter

Kisses!

Things Can Only Get Better

Dad's birthday. Woke up at 5 to wrap presents before final class prep. And then begged two kids and an adult with increasing desperation and superhuman amounts of groveling to sign his card from 6:45 to 7:50.

Was away all day on campus and then too late and tired to stop anywhere to get a birthday cake. (Lazy!!) Did a drive through Tim Hortons for 40 donut holes that the kids and I stacked into a pretty impressive "cake tower," parked a tealight on top, and had a festive birthday party anyway.

Happy Birthday, Daddy :). (You're the first feminist I ever met.)

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SUPER 8

Loved it. And the shout out to Dayton was the highlight of our quiet midwestern phase of life.

We've been putting off seeing it because of the Lupus-suspicion related anguish and Big A's even weirder hours. And as we walked into the movie theater, Li'l A said--I look at that poster for Super 8 and  I have no idea what it's going to be about.

I should have taken that opportunity to give my mom a heads up, because she told me later that she kept counting and recounting the kids and kept coming up with just six, so how were they the Super 8? She was thinking of the kids clubs we used to read when I was a kid--like Secret Seven and Famous Five :).

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With Caveats

After calling the derm for results repeatedly and being told that the results weren't in, computer was down, no one was available to read the results, we'll call you back (but no one called). After suspecting the worst, I finally received a call back. The nurse's assistant (nearly everyone had broken early for the long weekend) starts out by asking me how I'm doing. (How do you think?) And after talking to me about the weather, the upcoming weekend, apologizing for not calling sooner, says she went over it with a colleague to be sure, but it looks like the bloodwork appears to be in the normal range. So now we await biopsies.

Relief. Uncertainity. Not sure if we deserve this reprieve.

Knowing that if the biopsies come back clean, I'll be looking at shorter hair, and grandparents, husband, and eleven-year-old with shaven heads, and a life without chocolate.But it will be worth it to have a child with a host of other persnickety ailments that completely swallow our health services to the point where my dental work has been postponed for two years, but hey--perhaps not eating chocolate will resolve that.

_