Musings of a White Haired Teenager

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

The line is crossed. When the words cut through the veneer of superficial decency. The very structure of everyday life rests on assumptions that are paper thin and can be peeled away in simple acts that become tantamount to violence on the soul. It is not just an unkind word spoken in jest, but it is the sheer violence of intolerance and the soul breaking scourge of jealousy and suspicion. I am hurt and thus I write. The last few days has handed me certain experiences, not personal to me, but for people I care about that it opens up the need to question a kind of violence that is endemic. Happens all the time – in more ways than we may notice. I see it in my bondhus. Those who suffer, those who have to retreat to a new place, sometimes even create a “new me.” The reasons are many, and often recede to the background of hurt, but the reality changes and those who care would notice. Not noticing is as much a violence as the act of creating the hurt. Then, one tends to then look for the re

On this Sunday morning. There is a chill in the air. The autumn sun filters through the leaves that are battling to hold on to the chlorophyll as each leaf dies in a glory of color and it falls off. Eventually each leaf, on its own, no longer sustained by the community of the tree, meets its own personal death. Death is personal, isn’t it? In the end all the relationships, all that you thought you did, comes down to the ground to be swept away and be burnt in a heap of leaves. As I see the leaves fall it reminds me that we too will fall, some sooner than others, and when the fall comes will there be regrets, at the moment when the fall comes, will there be a moment of satisfaction that claims, “hey that was a good innings, had fun.” What is a good innings? As I sit on this wrought iron picnic table and watch the leaves come down, I wonder. What have I done for me lately? Many may have this question, but we do not want to confront it. Because we are caught up in the way we are perceived

When I Look in the Mirror. I see the white hair. Even though a dear bondhu said, “why do you worry about age.” And I look off the mirror I see a teenager. People ask me about the people I hang with. Why am I with young people more than with old people. And the younger look and see the white hair. Sometimes only. But the energy of the combination is electric. Instead of dwelling on cliched questions such as, “what is age?” I am increasingly finding it important to ask the question – “what memories do I need to make?” That gives me a timeline. A new timeline offered by COVID. Each of us were handled the new timetable and those who were creative were able to use the opportunities. I was at a presentation today, they asked me to speak on something and I spoke on entirely something else. The white hair saved the humiliation, but the teenager had a lot of fun. That is the irony of age. When I was actually a teenager I dreamt of driving around the city in a luxury car or being able to go to C

Here comes the Rain Again. As I sat on the rooftop lounge with a bondhu working out the details of a professional organization we are trying to create I ended up telling my life story. Looking back. Today. 20 years ago. The phone call. I wrote about in a previous entry here. Today we put some garlands, lit some incense, my wife told me to light an oil lamp. There was none at home. And now the wind howls as the storm steadily moves in over the water and getting ready to do landfall. When he had died the storm was in the mind, as the passing of a parent always leaves a debris of grief behind. Two decades. Some who have experienced the loss in recent years have a lot to learn. The debris is huge and time stamped, they appear at most unexpected moments. This loss is not measured by time but by glimpses that flitter through the mind unseen to all but apparent to me. Standing in the line to get my picture taken for the driver’s license I was reminded that many years ago at a similar driver’s

September 10 to 16, 2021: Remembering the Old Days. In some horrific ways. It was a cool autumn morning at the Air Force Base. I had the rental car and I remember I was wearing a dress shirt, khakis, a tie, and a sports coat. There was bad news from home. There was internal bleeding, the surgery had gone OK, but there were complications. Always unanticipated. Otherwise, they would not been complications. The jet lag still hung on me as a cloak as I sat there – a small version of a War Room – the walls adorned with pictures of famous people from the Air Force. The coffee was still warm, I was waiting for the meeting to start. I was there to present the findings of the study. Everyone was interested to know. This is why I had returned. The ride to the airport from Salt Lake was dismal. I had seen him being wheeled away, clean shaven, a smile on his face, he had said, “tumi choley jao – kaaj roeche tomar, aar orao ekla roeche (you should go back, you have a lot of work, and they are also