Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I was just reading something a friend wrote, talking about some significant backstory in zir life, and why zie doesn't usually talk about it. The reasons made sense, and I might well make the same choice in that situation—and I'm feeling honored that I'm one of the people zie has talked to about this, that it was worth it to zir to do that.

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.

I've spent much of the last day or so burbling to cattitude about my most recent trip: some of the conversation, some of the food, some of the general Montreal stuff. One thing that this brought to my attention is that before this past week, I hadn't really had time to talk seriously with papersky since last Easter: she was away in Britain when I visited in the summer, and she had a lot of other people to talk to during the Farthing Party.

This visit, we got plenty of time to talk, including but not limited to time by ourselves in the mornings, at home and out shopping, especially the last morning I was there, and I feel more solidly connected again. Nine months isn't long enough for me to have been strongly aware of what I was missing, but it was enough time for us both to have be missing it. We talked about writing, about other kinds of work, about people we love, about Montreal, about tea, all sorts of things. It wasn't just time for the two of us: three or four or five people feels different from forty or fifty, or even from smaller groups within a party of 20 or 30 attendees. When Papersky, rysmiel, hobbitbabe, and I spent a day together eating dim sum, going to the Biodome, then tea at Cha Noir and dinner at the Peruvian restaurant, it was the same four of us all day, and we knew it would be. That's a lot less hurried, without the sense of trying to talk to lots of cool people in a short period.

Also, I was sleep-deprived at the Farthing Party, and thus less focused on the conversation than I'd have liked, and don't remember it that well.