Musings of a White Haired Teenager

Memories begin when relationships are killed. Never leave me alone in an old house with many unexplored cabinets. Memories and relationships. A fundamental confusion. As I hold the pictures in my hand I remember. Remember relationships. We tend to think that memories are about people and places. Memories are of the past. They will never come back. But then even yesterday can also be called a memory too. And no one I know died. Many mornings will never come back but every moment of yesterday is precious. I spent the morning with a bondhu. I look forward to spending many more mornings with that bondhu. In every moment I spend with a person I am living out a relationship, one that started a long ago and one that I hope will continue for a long time. Memories are not about death, but it is about relationships. People may die, but relationships do not have to. The ones I have formed over the years and the ones I will form until I die. And until the relationship is killed it is not a memory....

I have been made irrelevant. Powerful words of dismay. Two of my colleagues are retiring. This was a sentiment of one person. It made me think of my personal irrelevance. Do people disappear when they retire? Go away to some dark place because they have been made irrelevant. Histories, relationships, and memories are wiped away, and the person realizes that whatever the person built is not needed anymore. Is this why some are scared of retirement? Many of my bondhus are retiring now. There are mandatory ages in some places, others have done well for themselves and can call it a day. Some have choices, others do not. Although retirement is glorified as the golden years, sometimes they turn out to be nightmares. Because of the irrelevance. As I think of this, I wonder how it would be for me. Will it become a dark place or really the golden years? The doubt comes from the fact that I know how it feels to be made irrelevant and “disappeared” even before retiring. It hurts like Hell, when y...

I am not a feminist. But. I get annoyed whenever patriarchy raises its ugly head and wants to put women down. And you are saying, not again, but hear out a person who is seeing it in the World he lives in. This is not theory, or politics, it is hard core real. Where does it say that women – daughters, mothers, wives – need to answer to the male counterpart for everything the woman does? I know it is a stupid question to ask, and some male readers will shudder to see a World where they have lost control on their daughters, sisters and most importantly their significant others. The worst crime – the woman that they “own” have another male they rely on. But they need to “wake up and smell the coffee.” I have bondhus who are doing amazing things with their lives, only to be dragged down by a male-dominated system which wants them to conform to the imagined World of the male. In my personal life, I have tried to resist this impulse. A bondhu explained this really well. The person asked how ...

I think she smiled at me. This was at my neighborhood Lowes, my regular grocery store, she and I were reaching for the same loaf of bread, and I pulled back and I think she smiled at me. Behind her mask. For the past year and a half, I cannot always tell when a stranger smiles at me. It is easier with my bondhus (those who are late to the musings, “bondhu” is a word that denotes something much more than a friend – a virtual soulmate – a person who gets you). I have bondhus who always smile with their eyes. You see it in the pictures, you can take a picture of such as person, cover up everything and look at the eyes, and you see the real person who you call a bondhu. The eye changes, the little lines around the eye spread out in a unique way and you can see the unseen smile. And during Covid, because of the mask we all had to learn to look for those lines around the eyes. The mask saves lives. Politics, and the accompanying stupidity apart, the fact remains that the mask has saved many ...

I was going through old pictures. Today. And I realized how enormous our collections are. Anyone with a digital camera can now take nearly endless number of pictures. Some are bad pictures, some are absolutely memorable. Memories digitized into pictures. And life stories meshed into the images. The pictures certainly brought back the stories connected with each picture. I even shared some of the pictures with some people. And I wrote, “those happy days.” That is the fallacy. Indeed, they were happy days, but why do we have a tonal of lamentation in that statement. It is as if those days will not return. Certainly, some will not, the conversations with my parents at AC 140 and pictures that captured those moments will not come back. But there are many moments, memorialized in pictures, that are fountainheads of expectations. Yes, surely, we have the memories. But those memories set up the expectations for the future. If we had it once, the moments, the relationships, then why can we not...

I went to watch a show. But found a community. As some of you know my son is a performer. He is in an act called “Grim Duplicity.” As the name suggests, it is all about death, the Grim part of the name is a direct reference to the Grim Reaper – the classic image of skeletal Death walking in a dark robe with the scythe in hand reaping souls. Thus, the Grim Duplicity is made up of two people, my son who plays the music of death and his partner who vocalizes death. Covid had stopped their lives temporarily, and now with venues opening up, they are performing. I spent part of the weekend to see their show. The performance was in a club called The Hollywood Comedy. Positioned on Melrose in the town of Hollywood – the club is intimate and popular to a special set of people who are not audiences but a community. And that is the community I found. A group of people, all young, going about their creative lives, entertaining each other, and supporting each other. The show became incidental to wh...