home for the holidays
It’s always good to see family, eat heartily, and soak in the ancestral bath of NJ, yet I dread the moments where I face my tenuous link to my heritage. Consider today:
I was at the [crab]ese grocery store. Mom had asked me to pick up a bag of rice and some eggs. I walk up to the storekeeper and ask, in my best [crab]ese, which aisle I could find the “beautiful microphones.”
The repeated attempts, the perplexed looks, all made me curl into myself like a battered mite. Someone teleport me back into the city, my distant and estranged city.
Home is grand, home is welcoming, home is warmth with chilly tendrils.