Birthday Love
24 May 2012 3 Comments
in celebrations, birthday, family, dancing, life, love
Happy Birthday to my best friend, partner in crime and husband, Varun!
Since I would never reveal his age online, I’ll just say this.
Two things about Varun that make me smile
1. The never-ending stream of songs that he changes the words of: Christmas songs, advertisement jingles, hymns…the surprising twists keep me on my toes. And giggling.
2. Varun’s willingness to laugh: at himself, at mistakes, at traffic, at cultural mishaps. I never know what he’ll find funny, what door he’ll jump out from behind or what form of food he’ll hide in my curls (yeah, we’re six years old).
Fear not. That’s a water gun.
Eight things about Varun that I admire
1. Love for God.
2. Loyalty. Varun loves his family and friends fiercely.
3. Integrity. His commitment to truth and character is amazing.
4. Compassion. Except toward spiders, cockroaches and poorly placed pigeon eggs.
5. Generosity. I’m pretty sure Varun would give away our fridge if it weren’t nailed down.
6. Chill-ness. Anyone who can nap without setting an alarm has my undying admiration. And kind of stresses my time-conscious self out.
Some of us take cricket pretty seriously….
7. Intellect. Give the man any two numbers and he can add them, multiply them, divide them. And make a cogent argument for most political, scientific and religious issues.
8. Dancing skills. He had me at “Bhangra”.
In Sepia
23 May 2012 Leave a Comment
in celebrations, family, food, Italy, life, love
Erratic blogging, unswept floors and a fridge full of dodgy looking produce. These images plague me as I try to regain traction and jump back into “normal” life. And yet there’s another set of images that gives me courage in days of long to-do lists and brings a soft smile to my face when the sadness pulls at my heart. It’s the pictures I snapped with my Mom’s iPhone during my trip to my parents house to say Goodbye to Grandma:
top:
two sibs spent the night curled up on the window seat in the hospital
laying Grandma’s body to rest next to her husband’s and daughter’s
“Biscotti is good food. Italians are healthy people” This explains my food ethos
middle:
champagne toast at the grave per Grandma’s request. A beautiful goodbye
my sibs and I after the funeral
pretty new shoes
bottom:
chai latte and a book I’ve wanted, given in the grace of a moment by a lovely friend
the glory of Spring
an Italian feast in the hospital room, our last dinner with Grandma
As I put this collage together, I kept realizing how incredibly blessed I am. Blessed with a loving and supportive husband who has held me when it’s gotten too much, and laughed with me in the in between times. Blessed with siblings who live thousands of miles away, but when we come back together we simply pick up where we last left off. Blessed with gracious, generous and loving parents. Blessed to have said goodbye to Grandma with laughter and tears, watching Youtube videos and being family in her hospital room. Blessed to have prayed and sung her into the presence of God.
So, so blessed.
A Tale of Two Drink Orders
17 May 2012 3 Comments
in customs, family, food, india
Tall, soy, extra hot, earl grey tea latte with 1/2 the syrup. This is my Starbucks drink of choice. When I was at my parents house earlier this month, my sister and I did a coffee run on the way home from the hospital. Our orders were complicated, personalized and long-winded. My poor 19 year old brother Luke was melting from embarrassment as we rattled off drink orders longer than a haiku.
We start ‘em young. My niece enjoying Starbucks. (Don’t worry, it’s just chocolate milk)
In contrast, when we stop for chai in India or are given it in someone’s home, it’s usually a simple process. No one asks if we want it, it’s simply provided, and sometimes sugar is provided for us to put in to our liking. No questions about size, milk fat, foam, shots of espresso. Everyone has chai. Everyone has the same type.
The tired looks are because it’s early morning, pre-chai consumption…
In my observations and in my reading about Indian culture, I’ve learned that in India (and many Eastern cultures), the emphasis is on the communal. Rather than our Western emphasis on individual differences and uniqueness, Indian culture tends to emphasize the group as a whole.
In truth, these emphases are deeply ingrained. Although I know this intellectually, when I entered Starbucks last week with my in-laws, I just assumed a Western stance and asked them a series of questions about their impending coffees. The resulting confusion reminded me that while we are similar in many ways, our cultural assumptions are an integral lens through which we see the world.
This is part of the fun and the complexity of marrying out; discovering that our gut reactions and instincts are sometimes quite different. The Eastern value on the group challenges me to reconsider the significance I place on the individual. Where I see trees, Varun sees forests. Where I see seven individuals with similar height and fuzzy hair, Varun sees my family. Sometimes this is disorienting. Sometimes this is frustrating. Lots of the time, it’s enriching. These days, I happily accept mugs of chai whenever Varun makes it; in turn, he has developed a preference for his own sentence-long Starbucks drink.
Leslie Newbigin, in his discussion of the difficulty of assessing one’s own culture, quotes this Chinese proverb,
“If you want a definition of water, don’t ask a fish.”
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