Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

In the course of buying cheese today, we were chatting with the salesperson, and I mentioned being from New York City. He asked why, then, I had an English accent. *blink*?

Another stranger (same kind of context) has asked if I was British, because he thought I had such an accent, since we moved to Bellevue. (I know there isn't one British accent, but that's what the guy said.) I've had people wonder that a time or two before, but not twice in as many months. I know I don't have a strong/stereotypical New York accent (though I do speak quickly), but "you don't sound like a New Yorker" and "you sound British" are very different statements.

The guy today said he had lived in New York for a year, a while back, while attending City University of New York, but when I asked "which part of CUNY?" gave me a blank look, as if he'd never heard the term "CUNY" before, and said he couldn't remember when I clarified that I meant which of the colleges that make up the City University, only that he had been studying business.

I went to my usual Chinatown place for lunch today. They put me at a table where a couple were already eating. [When people go there alone, the restaurant seats them at shared tables, usually large round ones that hold 6 or 8 customers; two people together at one of those tables suggests the place had been very busy when they arrived.] I sat down, poured myself tea, and ordered a big bowl of soup. Then another woman was seated at our table, and said something vaguely apologetic about sharing our table. I assured her "that's how they do it here," and that led to me chatting with her, and then to a cheerful four-person conversation, which included the couple's plans to move to Bangalore this fall (from Richmond, Virginia; they were in New York doing a few days of tourist stuff), and the other woman's child custody hearing this afternoon, which is why she was in Chinatown. So, India, exchange rates, the value of email for long-distance relationships (their 14-year-old son has a girlfriend he's not looking forward to leaving), the tendency of courts to make her nervous regardless of why she was walking into them, and some of the backstory of the custody hearing. (One-sided, of course, but if what she told me matches what the court has found, I think she'll win: she said her ex had put the kids in foster care, and she wants to get them back and take them home to London. All I know for sure is that she's angry at her ex—understandably, from her story—and wasn't obviously mad or antisocial.)

The odd bit was that she told me that I had an Irish accent and asked where I was from. rysmiel, papersky, I expect you are as startled by this as I am, though I did mention that I'd just been visiting an Irish friend and I might thus have picked up a little of the accent. That question/guess would have puzzled me from anyone, more from a woman who also said she was half-Irish (and half African) and has been living in London, not the US. She also commented on how healthy my lunch looked, because of the greens in the soup; one of the advantages, for me, of Chinese food is that I'm more likely to eat vegetables when I'm eating in that idiom than in most others.

The Virginians said goodbye with a promise to pray that she'd get custody. She and I talked a little longer, and after asking what I do, told me I must be a genius. I demurred, saying that what I am is a generalist, with a sticky memory that will go "that looks wrong" and check on things.