We’re already one month into the New Year (which did not feel very new what with routine work/school, and no vacations to herald it). Me thinks I should get in one post at least with the run down of what happened in just the very first month of this New Year:
The highlight of the last day of last year was a poster scrawled with wishes and autographs of daughter and daughter’s classmates – I believe their class managed to get an exam postponed citing the fact that it was their dear classmate’s mother’s birthday. Considering that it is a day I share with the Dark Lord (You-Know-Who), I am not sure how it could be made out as momentous enough for the teacher to cancel the exam, but cancel she did and even signed her wishes. Adopted family supplied the cake, the music, and the songs to drill in the message of the infallible frailty of youth and the unpredictability of life.
Then of course, life likes to reiterate the message once or twice with live examples. To what I would like to attribute to thinking a bit too actively about too many impossible things at breakfast, I locked myself out of my car on the third day of the New Year. This was for the fourth time. To make matters worse, the house keys were also in the car. To make matters even worse, the guardians of the extra house keys could not find it. So there were the duplicate car keys so safely locked in the house that even I, the rightful owner, could not get to them. After making frantic last minute arrangements to have child picked up at the bus-stop, a call to the emergency car services ushered a smug mechanic who unlocked the door (I tell you it was a lesson in car-jacking that I can now perform very easily if I had the tools), and sniggered that he would give me a discounted fee, as is due to a repeat offender.
While smirking kid informed me that I had broken the three-time jinx and got locked out for a fourth time so now that opens up the field for many more lockouts, colleagues lost no opportunity in proclaiming age-related memory decay. They sent me off to an in-house Ayurvedic health camp where the doctor in all solemnity declared that fire being the dominant element; a need for some calmness was in order. And for the record, nothing’s wrong with the memory or the head…just too many things in it
Too many things, like for example, how to occupy a teen during her 10-day Sankranti break when she is already miffed about a cancelled holiday to Tadoba Tiger Reserve? Work from home and call over kid’s friends – woe is me! Struggling with deadlines, cooking an Italian order, and startled by the sight of young girls in blue and purple wigs, numerous bangles, and painted faces and flowers on their fingernails. We hadn’t thought of pasta with basil and olives at 13 and our moms had stunted our nails with a simple stare!! Things have evolved so much that “Arre whaat re, arre?” is rolled out delicately as “Aw rei , wha’ re…aw rei?!”
I look at them and I shudder, thinking of the Facebook snippets my younger colleagues have exposed me to of the evolution of some 20 somethings. My jaw had dropped to see a pansy sitting there, posterior aimed directly at the world for a public viewing of another unimaginative tattoo in an unnervingly impossible place. My only thought at that time was that while she is at it, she could tattoo herself some underwear.
I prefer the blue and purple wigs for now and am prepared to expect the unexpected, like for example getting labeled as the Mad Hatter by the Alice and Cheshire in my family, especially since I thought I was oh so sane! Then there is the call late in the evening that frightens the daylights out of me till I realize it is a friend calling to inform me of a hermaphrodite designer in my hometown who shares my last name. And then in the night when something goes BUMP…yes I do still jump, but invariably it is daughter’s water bottle that has tumbled from its jauntily placed edge to flood the floor with water, and yes, I am the one mopping it up at 1am in the night.
So here's to expecting the unexpected – because things happen when you least expect it to and when you look at the bigger picture, the hidden pattern, the secret message, it’s all for the best. Or so I am told ;-)
