When I needed someone to talk to…
A Grateful Heart: Day 16
Nina and I are word-crazy people, who get high on books and feelings. We are both teachers, in different Colleges.
We complete each other’s sentences and juggle with commas and periods. And we seem to love the same things about people and places, too.
Nina is just as comfortably batty as I am. We revel in the fact that students in classrooms ask us the most irrelevant and unrelated questions and we have an answer to all of them. We met by chance, some months before my mother-in-law’s passing, and we had both been going through tough times. Her father had had to undergo a series of operations: and my mother in law who has become more autocratic and dominating with age, has dementia, incontinence, and an acute sodium-potassium imbalance. My husband and I battled it out every day, trying to stay sane and cheerful, but it was tough. Our usual state of mind is helplessness and a sense of impotent frustration when well-meaning people, convinced that we are not doing things the right way, call in with ‘advice.’
So when we met, late in the evening, Nina and I, we decided to talk of happier things, like our kids, and my adorable granddaughter, and our students and how delightful it is, to be teachers. Perhaps the last doesn’t strike a chord with many, but it is true, nevertheless. To go into a classroom filled with young people is to be prepared for the unexpected. You never know what the day is going to be like.
Nina insisted that she should see me home, because she was seriously concerned about how much weight I seemed to have lost, thanks to being constantly on my toes, as a Caregiver, at home.
So we are walking back home, and then, simultaneously, we raise our heads and look at the full moon in the sky, and then stand stock still. Because both of us are moon mad. There we were, standing and staring upwards, in the middle of the street, completely impervious to hysterically honking horns behind us, narrowly avoiding being run over, more because of luck than anything else. Then we realise where we are, and laugh, hardly aware of the baleful looks of passing motorists.
I snatch at passing moments like these nowadays: the company of strong women, five stolen minutes to look at the moon, the weight of a book in my hand…a book that I have been trying to complete over a month, amidst constant interruptions.
I am grateful to all my friends, and family, who have not given up on me, despite me not staying in touch.
And the trees I touch when I go for my morning walk.
©️ 2021 Suma Narayan. All Rights Reserved.
This is a response to ‘A Grateful Heart’, the November prompt of Ravyne Hawke’s light-filled publication, ‘Promptly Written’. Today is Day 16 of the month-long Gratitude Challenge.
