 |
| 9 October 2023 |
After almost 3 years since my Rosemary died I have found some solace reading Joan Didion’s essays. In an interview for the New York Times she said this:
“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
Of late as I go through old blogs of mine (5918 of them not including this one) correcting typos, I am astounded ( I have to beat on my own drum) that some of them are well written. I have now modified Joan Didion’s comment to:
I write entirely to find out what I was thinking, what I was looking at, what I saw and what it meant. What I wanted and what I feared.
Today I checked this blog (link below) for typos and found about 3. But I think it is one of my best ever.
My trip to Mexico City this Thursday has me not sleeping nights, packing and even ironing creases on my black jeans. These activities that I call menialities, keep me a tad distracted but then not so. When I pack I remember my grandmother who was an expert. The other expert was Rosemary. With her gone I can spot remnants of her existence everywhere. And today it was most visible when I opened my medium sized suitcase and the carry on. Inside there were all these plastic bags. Rosemary would carefully fold my shirts and T-shirts and put them into them. While not as good as she was for folding, my packing looks pretty good.
It was Rosemary who remembered the myriad stuff like chargers for our phones, small containers with our fave shampoo and of course the pasalubums. What is a pasalubum? This is Tagalog for the gifts you take for friends when you travel or the ones you bring back. I have five packages of Yorkshire Gold loose tea. When Rosemary and I lived in Mexico, good tea was not available. Some of our friends would bring us Lipton Tea bags which I must confess we often re-used. The Yorkshire Gold will be seen as real gold when I give them to my hosts who are sponsoring my participation in Mexico City’s International Book Fair beginning on the 13th.
The last time I was in Mexico City I went alone, but Rosemary was at home and she helped me, not only to pack, but she did all my travel arrangements and even found cheaper airline tickets.
Who would have suspected that the presence of plastic bags in a suitcase would have inspired me to write what is above?
