Stutter, memory

For the first time since I’ve been home, I went grocery shopping all by myself today. I had to drive to the gigantic mall nearby because that’s where the nearest grocery store is. Don’t ask why—it’s just the way it is.

Anyway, I was looking for ingredients to make pasta carbonara (one of the 7 meals in my culinary repertoire) and had trouble finding, of all things, pasta. I finally gave up and asked a girl in a smart gray uniform and navy blue vest.  She was moving boxes that didn’t look too heavy.

“Try Aisle 10,” she replied, pointing me a few aisles down.

I looked at the sign above Aisle 10. “WESTERN FOOD,” it said in large white letters.

Funny, because everything in King Soopers and Safeway in Denver was “Western food” and it went without saying. If you wanted jasmine rice, sesame seed oil or a good curry sauce you had to go to the “Asian/Mexican food” aisle to get it.

I couldn’t find the bacon either, until I stumbled upon a small store within the bigger store with a sign at the entrance that said: “NON-HALAL”. Inside, I found all kinds of things my Muslim friends would’ve deemed abominable: pork sausages, smoked bacon, non-smoked bacon, honey-roasted ham.

The salespeople on behind the display counter of unkosher delights gave me puzzled looks when I asked them how many grams there were in a pound. I practically burned my brains out trying to translate 1 lb. of bacon into damned metric grams until one of them (an alpha female of sorts, by my reckoning) finally said politely but sternly, “You get about 3 slices for every 100 grams, but we have no idea what a pound is.” I picked up 600 grams of it because I remembered that 1 kilogram = 2.2 lbs. = 1000 grams. Or something like that.

I put the package neatly in the corner of my green basket and when I got to the real counter where I checked out all my other items, I was mindful to take the already-paid-for package of bacon out so it wouldn’t accidentally render unclean the Muslim boy sacking my groceries. Something about the whole process made me feel a bit sheepish for buying a pork product.

Later, at the barber’s near my house, I found myself staring at a picture of Ganesh while the barber, a man from India in his late 30’s, hovered a pair of unstoppable scissors and a large white comb over my head. I marvelled at his blue skin and elephant head—Ganesh’s, that is, not my barber’s—and tried to recall the story one of my Hindu students told in my World Religions class last semester about how he (Ganesh, again) lost his human head and got replaced with an elephant one instead.

My attempt at remembering was interrupted by a new thump-thump beat exploding from a small radio on the shelf. The song made me think of OneRepublic and that ubiquitous song they used to play at Rude gym off Federal Boulevard in Denver. It’s too late to apologize, it’s too laaaate…. Except it wasn’t that song exactly. Plus it was in Tamil.

Just then a man came into the shop with two small children. Conversation between him and my anonymous (to me, at least) barber took place in reams of unfurling Tamil syllables, at the end of which the man turned to his son and said, “Wait here. I have to go home and get some money.” The toddler obediently sat down and looked at my barber with some measure of awe at the unrelenting scissors still grazing off my hair at the edge of the white comb. His dad took his sister by the hand and walked out. It made me happy to live in a country where, in some places at least, you could still trust a barber to watch your kid for a bit.

Then I got to thinking what I was doing this time last year, when 2007 was coming to an end.

I remember a fantastic Christmas-octave dinner (of fish, I’m quite sure) at Brian and Sarah’s during which we finished a bottle of wine, which undoubtedly caused me to doze off while we were watching Elf afterwards. I remember the fireplace and the crackling fire that was really just their last starter log because they’d run out of real firewood. I (vaguely) remember Brian giving me a blanket to keep me warm since I was already crashed out on their couch, and I remember waking up in the middle of the night on that couch in their living room and being comforted by the warm glow of lights on the Christmas tree and a luminous moon pouring in through the east window.

I remember waking up the next morning to the smell of coffee which Sarah had made, a light breakfast afterwards, and driving home happy about this: though none of us had stayed up late enough to greet the new year (we were all in bed by 11!), I’d started it off in good company.