I was watching the Democratic Convention in the US where Kamala Harris, a black Vice-Presidential candidate, the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, spoke eloquently of her life. I was touched by her recall of her mother, divorced and alone, struggling in an alien world. Kamala hoped that her mother was looking down from above at her signal triumph.
 
It touched me especially because it made me think of the hard struggle my father and mother had to wage in India to live decently and bring me up. Now that I live in a charming, bucolic place, alone in a large house surrounded by woods and a lake, I wish I had my parents with me, and I could look after them. I feel I didn’t have enough quality time with them, I couldn’t look after them well enough. I don’t believe that they are up in the clouds and can share in the comfort with me. I miss them.
 
I remember the day I left India for the US. Both my father and my mother came to the airport to see me off. I find it hard to forget what my father said, “I wonder if I will ever see you again.” My mother gently reproved him, saying, “You mustn’t think like that. Of course, you will see him again.” I said, “Dad, even in India I travel often, and you don’t always get to see me. Washington is just another city. I will certainly come again and see you. We will meet often.”
 
Sadly, my father’s words proved prophetic. He died suddenly because of a botched surgery. I did not see him again. I was traveling. His last rites had to be done before I could reach India. His last words to me keep ringing in my ears, “I wonder if I will ever see you again.” My inept, optimistic words, when I think of them, seem to mock me.
 
My brothers, who were present at his deathbed, said my father asked about me and they had to console him by saying that I lived far away and it would take time for me to reach his side. I never saw him again. He never saw me again. Just as he had mused.

Those words haunt me. I wish I could see him again. I wish I could walk with him, as often I used to do. I wish I could take care of him, take him places he would have liked, buy him things he would have enjoyed, give him a few days of comfort and closeness and caring. I wish I could look after him the way he looked after me, lovingly, punctiliously, when I was a child. Heaven knows I would have very much liked to.

​That longing never leaves me. It stays with me day and night and it recurs every time I see a new city that I like, a new museum I visit, a new show I see in Washington or New York or in a new country. He enjoyed new experiences. He liked to visit new places, try new food, meet new people. The times we traveled together I saw his childlike joy, his pleasure in savoring the tea at a railway station, his eagerness to know the fellow passengers in a bus or train, his happy absorption in the simple countryside scenes we passed, his utter imperviousness to the inconveniences of a new place, a new home.
 
When I took a job and lived in another town for some months, I invited my father to visit me. In just a few days, he knew every one of my neighbors, even their children. More significantly, he made me buy vitamins for a driver’s child because he looked frail and increase the gardener’s pay because he had found out that his wife was in a hospital. When he left, the old cook – whose handiwork my father had praised to high heavens – was bold enough to tell me that I should have persuaded him to stay longer. His chastisement remains ironically in my memory. I wish I could have arranged for him to stay longer with us.
 
I know I will not see him again. I can only look at my favorite photo of him, an inept closeup I took of his surprisingly-unlined face, topped by soft, silken, thinning hair, accidentally capturing the essence of a thoughtful, friendly, gentle man, who adored his wife and admired his children and gratefully absorbed the simplest goodness that life had offered him.
 
Quite unreasonably, I never seem to get over the fact that I could not reach his bedside when he was breathing his last. Some months ago, he responded to my longing by appearing in a dream. I was traveling on a long-distance bus on some dusty road when, from my window, I saw in the window of a bus traveling in the opposite direction – I just couldn’t believe my luck – my father! He seemed to be looking for something, perhaps me. I shot up, rang the bell and frantically shouted for the bus driver to stop. I ran out, crossed the road, ran frantically at the other bus just departing, hollering all the time for its driver to stop, hoping desperately that at least the conductor or a passenger would hear me and stop the bus. Nobody did. The bus went away, gathering speed, leaving me stranded, despondent, in a cloud of fumes and dust.
 
He did not see me. I never saw him again.

​The first factory I ever saw was one that was to shape my life. It was my first job, my first encounter with the world of work.
 
I had spent twenty years studying in schools, a college and a university. It was a very different world. You survived in that world by very different rules. It was a world of make-believe, of noble and persuasive pretensions. Knowledge, it declared, was power and it was that power that it pretended to disperse. Most that entered its portals, however, came out feeling powerless against the juggernaut of the universe that waited for them. There what mattered was money, position and connections, and few cared what you knew or didn’t.
 
I had acquired the requisite cunning of the academic world: I gobbled selectively some prescribed texts, regurgitated appropriately in an examination hall and received the worthless certificates employers wanted to see. I had learned nothing of what I should have learned: how to work in a group, what food I should eat, the way my body works, how my city worked, the patchwork of castes and tribes that makes up my society. I had studied economics, but knew nothing of stock exchanges, bank collapses or international commerce.
 
Now I was beginning my next twenty years in business. It took me a few years to realize that it was another world of make-believe, of noble and persuasive pretensions. Business, it declared, was there to serve society, to produce goods people needed, offer services that made life comfortable, build houses children could live in and buses or cars adults could travel in, pay taxes to government that it can use to help people, make life wonderful all around.
 
I was taking my first step in the new world now by walking into a giant tire factory. My first job was to work in a car tire assembly shop where you took the metal bead, the rubberized fabric and heavy rubber tread and put it together on an assembling machine. You stood next to a rotating metal drum, and one by one added the different elements until you had a complete raw tire. I did this for eight hours until my shirt was wet with sweat and my arms ached. It took me four days to reach the output that every assembly worker is expected to reach to keep his job.

Next, I worked in the molding shop where the raw tire is ‘cured’ or baked at high temperature. The shop temperature was never below 40 ̊ Celsius and, closer to the mold, in which you must place the tire, it was even higher. Standing for eight hours on a concrete floor – the company laughed at my idea of carpeting or rubber flooring – I soon realized why most of the workers suffered from corns and heel spurs, if not damaged knee and ankle joints and varicose veins.
 
​I also spent a few days learning the trade at the prep shops where rubber was mixed with chemicals to create the rubber compound and the rayon or nylon was rubber-coated. The place was cooler, but the giant mills were a perpetual threat. The slightest carelessness and a worker could lose his arm in the huge grinding rolls.
 
I worked only a few days at each of the jobs to learn the process and understand the machines. But I understood something more. I understood how ruthless were the demands of industry, how reckless was its roulette with the health and safety of workers, how impervious to the long-term welfare of the majority of its employees. My work at the factory, though mostly uncomfortable and sometimes painful, had done me the favor of giving an insight into how easily the most reputed organizations turn fiercely exploitative.
 
A few months later, when a position opened at the headquarters, the English factory director called me into his office and told me that he had decided that my talents would be better used in the fashionable city office. The office was slick, modern, comfortable. Everybody wore a suit and a tie; fancy suede shoes seemed to be in vogue. The company offered free cigarettes at every meeting, free drinks at every party and free lunches at the frequent group conferences. There was suavity to every dispute and even reprimands were administered with grace and muffled voice.
 
Business surely wore a new face in the city, different from the one I had seen in the outlying factory. But I had learned my lesson. I began to observe carefully and watch the subtle undercurrents of rivalry and hostility. However camouflaged, the pettiness and insidious contention of commerce started getting increasingly observable. Thus started my sustained interest in organizational pathology: the ills and evils that stalk all human organizations, from trade to commerce, hospitals to universities.
 
When I moved later to diplomacy and eventually consulting, I began to put to good use what I had learned to watch for in industry. Those first awkward, hesitant, painful days, sweating in the floor of tire shops, had not been in vain.

I saw in Tokyo what I don’t expect to anywhere else: my Japanese neighbor, a historian in his eighties, mounted on a tall ladder, gently cleaning the high leaves of a sakura tree with a small brush and a pale of water.
 
I did not see but read of Hitler’s Germany: Jews were forced, as a measure of public humiliation, to clean streets with a toothbrush and a pale of water.
 
The first was an act of love and the second an act of hate. But they gave me an idea.
 
In my home, there is a charming deck on the second floor. It has specially treated cobalt-gray wood for flooring and an attractive white railing running around it. There are tall, beautiful firs and oaks all around the deck and I wanted to be able to see them without the interference of a sizable railing. I ordered a special railing, distinctly thin, that would obstruct the view as little as possible. It has a gently curved top rail, and especially thin bars to the floor, permitting a good view of the surrounding scene. In fact, one can sit on the deck and feel in a garden ringed by an honor guard of protective trees.
 
I sit on the deck often and read and write. I have planted a large umbrella that shades me when there is sun or rain. I enjoy my time on the deck so much that I have overlooked that, over months a layer of dirt and dust has collected on the railing and its bars. The sparkling-white railing is no longer white but has patches of gray and dark gray. That gave me the idea that I should restore the railing back to its pristine color with a toothbrush. The top rail is curved and its supporting bars are square, and a toothbrush seemed the right instrument.
 
The top surface of the railing had the biggest collection of dirt and I decided to address it first. It was also the easiest part of the work, for I could do it standing upright. I dipped the toothbrush in soapy water and started scrubbing. It was amazing the time it took to remove the last speck of dirt from the top of the railing.

Now came the bigger part of the job: cleaning the upright supporting bars. They were quite a few and each had four sides to be cleaned. Moreover, one needed to bend down and clean the lower part of the bars. I did a part of it standing and stooping, and the rest sitting on a stool. It took several hours and a lot of soapsuds. I worked with my right hand and, when it tired, I used my left hand. I had read that Gandhi, when he grew tired of writing with his right hand, switched to his left hand rather than interrupt his writing. I decided to follow that illustrious example.

​Several hours later, I came to the last part of the railing. Sweating, I finished the cleaning with a flourish of relief. To top off my accomplishment, I brought a fresh toothbrush and went over the railing in selected placed a second time, giving it a fresher, brighter look. It remained only to sit back and admire a gleaming white railing around my deck.
 
Jerome, a neighbor, came to take a look. His first question was why I didn’t hire somebody to do the cleaning. I explained that it would then be somebody else’s accomplishment, not mine. His second thought was his bewilderment that I should use a toothbrush – and spend hours rubbing it – rather than spray a strong chemical and then wipe it off with a disposable napkin. I could have argued against the indiscriminate use of chemicals, but I realized he was missing the heart of the matter.
 
A maid comes periodically to clean my home. In between her visits, a robot whirrs all over the house and picks up dirt. Besides taking out the well-packed garbage from time to time, I labor over nothing in my home. Labor is something I see others doing, not something I ever do. Looking over the last several decades of my life, when I was provided cooks, maids, drivers, nannies, even valets sometimes, I had a scant encounter with physical labor of any kind.
 
Some would take this distance from labor as a badge of dignified existence and credit me with an aristocratic style of life. They would be wrong. I am plebeian enough to believe that to be a stranger to labor is to be estranged from real life itself, the life that vast numbers of my fellow beings live.
 
To clean a very visible part of my favorite deck is therefore to get closer to life itself, to bridge a little of the distance between me and many others. I want periodically to work and to sweat so that I remember my connection with the people around me.
 
If that sounds a little too philosophical – or, forgive the pun, too labored – let me tell you that even Jerome, my skeptical neighbor, was impressed how splendid looked the railing on my deck. I had something to show for what he (and others aristocratically inclined) might consider wasted hours: a beautiful, gleaming-white railing, sparkling in the sun.
 
I had created something pretty. All with a toothbrush or two.

Our parents never had money enough to buy a home or an apartment. Fortunately, our father had a job that entailed an apartment. It was a coincidence that, when I came out of the university, I found a job on an industrial estate away from the city. It too entailed an apartment.
 
Perhaps that is why the idea of owning a home was alien to me. I was quite content to live in a rented place. It would leave me free to move to another place if I wanted a change. That kind of freedom appealed to me. Who knew if I wanted to move to another city or country? I liked living in Kolkata, but I did not feel impelled to live there forever. A college friend, Ramaprasad, who was later to join the Indian Foreign Service, promptly sold his share in the large home his affluent father had bequeathed him and his brother, saying, “I didn’t want to be tied to that mansion, like a cow tied to a post.” He explained to me that he had noticed with his parents that all planning, whether a trip or a vacation, had to start with the house, its safekeeping and maintenance, “It seemed my father didn’t own the house, the house owned him.” He didn’t want to be strapped to an anchor. I felt the same way.
 
It was quite a surprise when my younger brother sprang a surprise. “A new building is coming up in a prime area in the city. It will have decent apartments. Would you like to consider buying one?” He made the proposal more appealing by suggesting that we, the three brothers, could all buy apartments on the same floor and live close to one another. I found the idea irresistible. I bought.
 
When I came to the US, my American wife, who had never owned a home, was keen to acquire one. The tax laws were on her side. Once again, I became a home-owner. I have to admit I rather like the place where I live. There are lakes and woods and gardens, and you regularly see birds and geese and deer. It is urban enough to let me buy next-door whatever I need and pastoral enough to let me walk among trees and shrubs. But do I need such a large house of which I use only a fractional part? And do I need to own it?
 
I rather like the idea of the capricious billionaire, Howard Hughes, who could buy any mansion he chose but preferred to live on a secluded floor of a hotel. Somehow the idea appeals to me, though many find it bizarre. I worked once for a large company that offered me a charming leased house and was quite startled when I asked if they would pay for a furnished room in a local club. Not having grown up rich, perhaps I have never had the opportunity to develop a taste for opulent and wasteful space. I also like the feeling of freedom of not having to look after a brick-and-mortar structure that evokes no strong passion. Of course, I know others who like to lavish their care on curtains, carpets and colossal chandeliers. I prefer some free time to read Murakami or listen to Mahler.

​My industrious neighbors, Suzette and Ivan, take punctilious care of their garden and front yard and I can only look on with admiration. I cannot emulate. In truth, I would not. It would take too much of my time and attention. I have to sadly reflect that life is a matter of choices. If I have to choose between the perfect home and a decent-enough home, the balance is loaded on the side that lets me pursue my stronger interests. My brief exposure to flying and longer experience of long-distance driving suggest that I would have greatly enjoyed learning to fly a small aircraft, but I quickly dropped the idea for the same reason. The investment of time and effort, besides the expense, would have barred other, dearer pursuits.
 
A juvenile friend told me the other day that the fact that poor people largely play football, middle-class people choose tennis and rich people prefer golf, shows that affluence reduces the object of your affection – the size of the ball. Age or experience may have jaded me enough to transfer my affection to something even smaller, the printed word. But the passion has been potent enough to overlook the imperfections of my home. I don’t need a massive edifice to read the few books and magazines I read. I need no more than a tiny table for my laptop to write the few things I write.
 
And there lies the supreme reason for my aversion to a commitment to a permanent home. No home is perfect. Worse, no home is perfect enough – just as Elizabeth Taylor reportedly said of her seven divorces that no husband was perfect enough – for lifelong attachment. I would like a modest variation of the so-called American Dream: a home not bought but just occupied, for just as long as your heart revels in it. Live in it, make use of it and enjoy it. Then,  when the untamed devil that lives in every human heart prompts you, move on to another home, large or small, ancient or modern, that soothes your mind and delights your heart. Perhaps, in my lazy soul, there still lurks a craving to be unanchored, an undying, unregenerate gypsy spirit.

A friendly neighbor from Punjab dropped in my New Delhi home a warm summer afternoon. I looked at his sweat-streaked face and asked if I could get him a cold drink.
 
“A coke, please,” he said gratefully.
 
I went to the kitchen, filled a quarter of a tall glass with ice cubes, poured coke to the brim and offered it to him.
 
Instead of sipping, he lifted the glass, estimated the amount of ice in it and said, “Are you running short of coke?”
 
Chastened, I took the glass back to the kitchen, threw out the ice cubes save three, poured more of coke and handed the glass to my friend. He drank contentedly.
 
An hour later he left. The bell rang again and another neighbor, an American, came to visit. He was perspiring too, and I acted the considerate host and offered a cold drink.
 
The same polite response, “A coke, please.”
 
Once again, I went to the kitchen, took another tall glass, filled it nearly to the brim with coke and then, mindful of the earlier admonition, carefully added three cubes of ice.
 
The American friend accepted the glass with a polite word of thanks and placed it on the side table. He was about to take a sip but stopped to lift the glass and look at its contents.
 
He peered at the three lonely ice cubes at the bottom of the glass.
 
“Are you running short of ice?” he asked.

​Blessed is the simpleton who believes that we, humans, are all brothers and sisters under the skin. We are as different as different can be. We talk differently, eat different things, like and hate vastly different things, we even look irremediably different.
If you think looks are superficial things, you may have just arrived on this planet from Mars. I doubt Charlize Theron and Margot Robbie get their million-dollar roles in Hollywood because of their wits or scholarship. Some observers suspect two-thirds of people, especially women, find their jobs in companies by looks rather than skills. L’Oréal and Unilever sell $50 billion of cosmetics each year, not to speak of Estée Lauder and Procter & Gamble. The curious part is that dark people want to look fair and white people want to turn dark. Every Bollywood song-and-dance routine hires pale girls from Ukraine and every woman on a cruise I took recently lay in the sun semi-naked on the deck until baked crisp to crimson.
 
Our habits are harder to reconcile. The Chinese are reported to eat whatever moves, from bat to bison, the Japanese enjoy whatever comes out of the sea (I can’t name the creatures, but they taste good), Koreans enjoy a live octopus and Cambodians feast on fried tarantulas. The average American, including Indian American, cannot dine without a beef steak, while in India you will be beaten or lynched even suspected to taste beef. I tried to stay away from exotic delicacies: eating grasshoppers in Thailand, chicken feet in the Caribbean, stewed cow head in the Middle East and snakes with tribes in India.
 
To show my admiration for local customs I have worn a tuxedo in the UK, a galabia in Abu Dhabi, a dhoti in Bangladesh, the formal Barong Tagalog in the Philippines, the guayabera in Colombia and the Dominican Republic, and the shortest of shorts on US beaches. While at fashion shows in Paris, Madrid or New York women make men lose their head wearing Versace or Gucci that reveal more than half of their best assets, the women would probably lose their head wearing those dresses in Riyadh or Islamabad. The modest Indian housewife wraps herself elaborately in a long sari, but foreigners gawk wide-eyed at the wide expanse of their torso a skimpy blouse barely covers.
 
Let me not talk about the crazy juxtaposition that some countries drive on the left of the road while others on the right, creating havoc for visiting tourists and forcing car-makers to make different cars for different markets. In Spain slaughtering a succession of sturdy bulls I found to be a great sport, while in Nepal slaughtering 250 thousand buffaloes and goats for some crass goddess is supposed to be great worship.
 
There is no limit, of course, to the wildly different things people want to worship and believe. Let alone the big faiths of love and peace that are forever killing one another, there are the Ho No Haga Sampyago that diagnoses you by your feet, the Freedomites who believe in parading naked to show contempt for authority, the Solar Temple Order that sacrificed an infant for embodied evil, Raelism that started a company to clone decent humans, Chen Tao that waits for a god to descend from a flying saucer, and the notorious Aum Shinrikyo that tried to raise consciousness by putting deadly Sarin gas in five Tokyo trains.
 
The extent of human differences beggars imagination. Blessed are the people who work idealistically for the United Nations group, as I once did, and try to unite countries, because it seems a pretty uphill business to try to unite humans, armed as they are with their tastes and beliefs – and convinced that those represent the unique standard of normalcy.

“Busy, very busy,” is the commonest response I hear when I greet people, “How are you?”
 
Apparently, being busy is a badge of honor that many people now like to flaunt.

​Some like to flaunt their car if they have just bought a Bentley or BMW with fancy features. Some flaunt their unseemly huge home, like the boor who built a 22-story mansion for his small family next door to a slum. Another display barely less klutzy is of one’s celebrity or power. Witness our lovable but crass stars of movie and television. Our politicos are now strong rivals, whether they sport long red ties or saffron robes. They all develop their unique ways of brandishing their importance.
 
What are lesser mortals to do? Are they to seem perennially insignificant and burrow in the dust-colored anthill of the multitude? So, they don the colored robe of the busy bee, like royalty wearing their clumsy ermine robes, and proudly tell you how harried they are.
 
“I have no time to breathe.”
“My weekends are worse than my office days. There is too much to do.”
“Busy, busy, busy! I have no time for anything these days.”
 
Of course, you are breathing, your weekends are free for chosen things and you have time for many things. Perhaps you don’t have time for me, the person you are talking to, and you intend to cloak that reluctance by claiming falsely exaggerated chores. But the likelier reason for your claim, when you habitually cite it, is that you want to project your importance. You are busier than the chairman of the country’s largest corporation or its president so saddled you are with giant responsibilities. By saying that, you expect to gain importance in others’ eyes. What you gain is the comical image of a self-important busybody.
 
Willard, my former colleague in a consulting firm, told me, “I used to say a lot, ‘I’m very busy,’ mostly to ward off requests from colleagues or clients. Then I  realized what a rude thing it is to tell the other person in effect, ‘I don’t want to hear anything from you because I don’t think it is important.’ Worse, I was disparaging myself. I was almost making a confession.”
 
“Confession?”
 
“Yes, I was confessing that I let others set my agenda rather than setting it myself. Bosses may set goals or targets, but my agenda is my province. I determine what goes into it, what I do and how I do it. If I am so busy that I am frantic, it means I have allowed others to set an unreasonable pace. Instead of suggesting that I am a person of importance, it suggests that I am so unimportant that I can’t even determine my own life. Others dictate it.”
 
Vanessa, who lives a busy life indeed as a pediatrician in the local hospital, gave me another point of view, “‘I am very busy’ is a silly thing to say, either as a motto or as an explanation. It amounts to saying I permit outside forces to decide what I do, instead of my own intentions or plans. If I am not anybody’s puppet, but an adult with my ideas and preferences, I may not always get what I want, but I must live my own life. I should set my speed and give attention to what I value. I should never be too busy to live my life my way, listen to my patients, my children, my friends.”
 
What does it mean to say, “I am very busy?” I asked my neighbor and friend, Victor, a technology entrepreneur who has floated and sold three companies and seems to live a full life with his wife and three children.
 
“Busy? Of course, I am busy. I look after my projects – any time I have three to five of them – but I would consider it presumptuous to tell clients that I was very busy. I know others who are busier than me. In any case, I should never be too busy to listen to my clients or my children.
 
“I would be ashamed to tell anybody, “I’m too busy to attend to you,” because it would be like admitting I have no control over my life. I am a professional, I take pride in managing my affairs. I am not always right, but I will never give up using my judgment and rush from pillar to post and claim I am furiously busy. It is like saying I can’t manage my affairs. Even worse, it means I won’t manage my affairs. Last month, when a close friend died, I cancelled all appointments. Not only I attended the funeral, but also took the whole day off to grieve for my friend. I don’t want to be too busy for that kind of thing.”
 
Am I too busy? I like to do things. Honestly, I want to do many things. I manage them poorly, but the management is mine and I will not give it up. I welcome others’ help, but I hope I will always be open to suggestions and counsel. Above all, I want to be ever open to friends and neighbors, colleagues and relatives, who want to ask a question, share a thought or simply want to chat for a minute. I never want to gain importance by saying, “Sorry, I am very busy.”

I live in a bucolic place a few miles outside Washington and every day I like to go for a walk. Sometimes I walk around a lake nearby and sometimes I walk through the woods. I watch the geese crisscrossing the rippling waters or I hear tiny birds singing a chorus. Today I strayed.
 
There is a playground near my home. Children are playing there usually, their parents often hovering around. I avoid the assembly and invariably go past the playground. Strangely, it was different today. Nobody was there. I looked at the large playground, covered with a thick carpet of grass. The huge expanse of green suddenly made me nostalgic.
 
In a second, I went back years. Our father liked flowers, and the gardener put fresh flowers in a vase in each room. Except for mine – for everybody knew I preferred trees and plants to flowers. The gardener had placed a coy little plant in a corner of my room. I had nothing against red, yellow or purple, but green was my favorite color. A towering tree was incomparable, but an expanse of a green lawn was the prettiest thing imaginable.
 
For a while, we lived in a house that had a lawn next to it. It was my favorite place. I could wander there; if nobody stopped me, I could lie down there. Then we moved to a larger house that had many charms but no lawn. Fortunately, it was next to a university that had a large lawn. Some students periodically loitered there, but early morning and late evening nobody lingered. The guard would be busy making his breakfast or dinner – I could see from the outside – and I would comfortably slip in unobserved. It was a large lawn and its manicured grass was a feast for the eyes. For the feet too. I would leave my shoes aside, then walk barefoot on the dew-softened lawn.
 
Father had an endless interest in whatever I did and, when I told him about the lawn, he came along early morning with me one weekend. Instead of avoiding the guard, he just walked up to him and said, “I believe you have a beautiful lawn. Could I have a look?” The guard not only opened the gate wide, he even saluted Father and welcomed him. While I ran barefoot, to and fro, across the lawn, Father kept walking briskly around the lawn. When we came back and Mother asked where we had been, Father joked and said, “I was running on the university lawn. But your son is lazy, he only walked.” As Mother turned to me with a questioning look, I said, “Why don’t you come with us the next time? Then you can see what happens.”

​Years later, long after Father had passed away, Mother came to visit me in Manila, where I worked and taught. My university students loved to come to my home for weekend parties, and they invited Mother to visit the university.
 
As we entered the university compound, we stood together at the edge of the extended emerald of a superbly-kept lawn and I said, “Ma, do you remember the large lawn next to our old house?”
 
“Of course, I do,” she said. “I got busy every morning making breakfast for our family before I left for work. I never had a chance to accompany you and your dad to the university and see the lawn there. I never knew who ran and who just walked.” She remembered!
 
I recalled Father’s joke and said, “He walked, and I ran. But that mattered little. We were together all the time. We did everything together.”
 
This breezy afternoon, I was glad I had strayed from my usual path. The lawn brought me a strange calm. I walked quietly. And alone. Not quite. Some antique memories, like old scars you barely see but can still feel, kept me company.