sidewalk scribbling

I’ve always found it interesting how human nature skirts around logic sometimes, simply striding past without so much as a glance at it – like the motes of dust that swirl around us, that we brush off our cheeks and inhale into our bodies, invisible to us except when a stray ray of light falls across them at an angle, and suddenly there they are, slow, hypnotic, afloat, little specks of dust. Maybe it’s not logic- maybe the idea I’m looking for is empathy.  I don’t think empathy is as innate in humans as we would hope it to be.  Which is why women who internally rage at their husbands for never pitching in with the housework always ask their daughters or daughters in law – never their sons - to bring the forgotten water bottle from the kitchen; which is why when we’re crossing the road and a car honks at us, we shake our fists at them and think ‘people in cars are such schmucks’ and when we’re the ones in the car and somebody takes too long to move from one end of the ...

I wonder if they’re taught the rules in school or is it one of those talks that your parents (and by ‘your’ I mean the parents in movies because face it, Pakistani parents never have ‘talks’ with you...) have with you when you’re 10 years old – is there a book that is handed out for free in shopping malls and grocery store, and if so, how come I didn’t get it? Maybe the Brits are just born with an instinct for proper bus behavior, just something that runs in their blood so that they don’t even have to think twice about falling into their place in the queues at bus stops and giving up their seats to the elderly, making their way down the moving bus so that when it finally pulls to their stop they don’t make the rest of the passengers wait and just hop out – a polite ‘thank you’ to the bus driver who bats it right back, ‘cheers!’. I’ve read those Facebook posts about racist people on the bus or at the underground/subway but so far the most kindness I’ve seen is on the bus (an...

June 26 My almost-Dementia is one of the secrets behind my regret-free, generally grateful and optimistic outlook on life. It is this friendly forgetfulness, at least in part, that makes looking back at my past such a bittersweet and pleasurable activity. I’m not like Sonya, who wades in murky streams most of her days, her skin wrinkled and pale because of the time she spends feeling bitter. She has a picture-perfect memory and can recall the purple plastic watch her best friend was wearing on her right wrist on the fifth day of first grade. But her memory kind of works like he media – bad news sells, it sticks and draws more attention. The thorns sticking into her feet, scratching her arms and holding on to the cloaks she wears are too prickly, their sharpness stings so much that she cannot feel the softer, silky petals of happier days. And so Sonya spends more time thinking about the time her mother got so angry at her for repeatedly asking to go to a friend’s party that s...