Trini Window Seat

In "The Memory Time Machine" you go back and you revisit one moment from your past. It's not a moment you want to change. It's just a moment you'd like to linger in a little longer. What's the memory? 

My aunts were rarely all in the same place at once. The maternal side of my family is small. My grandmother only had five children, and each of them only had 1 or 2. My mother was the outlier and had three children (but didn't intend to). I always wished we had a bigger family, one with lots of cousins and uncles and aunts who held big events together full of laughing and cooking and music. We didn't do family reunions or birthday get togethers at all, so the one time all of my aunts came to visit my grandmother while my siblings and I were living with her (during the time my mother was living in the US) made such a huge impression on me as a kid.

The nostalgia is coming up more and more lately, and then I do things like buy glass samples of the glass panels from the living room doors at my grandmother's house in Tobago and bid on (and win) the Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast read-along books from the 90s that came with watches (I had the Little Mermaid one which was blue and filled with water in a little bubble and my sister had the Beauty and Beast one) even though neither watch obviously works. And then I hear that the Arthur theme song was written by a Caribbean person and after playing the song twice I remember what it felt like to look forward to watching PBS kids and sing along to the theme songs from our old battered brown couch in a suburb of NJ.

It's bittersweet and annoying that things from my childhood keep presenting themselves to me like this at this age. It feels like those years and feelings (which I can tap into so easily lately) shouldn't feel so fresh and painful still in my very middle adulthood and yet it's also a propos. Things reckon with you even when you don't intend to reckon with them.

The longest and most anxiety-causing chapter was due today. I finished it but I can't quite vouch for its quality. The other one isn't due until July and I'm only responsible for a small portion of it as I'm collaborating with a few of my colleagues but this is no less anxiety causing because I don't want to be judged by these people for not only waiting until the last minute, but also for the quality of my work. Be that as it may, I did in fact wait until the last minute sooo yeah. We are discussing our progress on the chapter tomorrow afternoon. The only thing I was able to produce tonight was an outline and some sources I plan to cite. The actual writing will take place tomorrow morning and, if I'm lucky, will be done before my meeting in the afternoon.