Latest update April 23rd, 2024 12:59 AM
Aug 25, 2013 Features / Columnists, My Column
When people said that the world was getting smaller, what they meant was that it was taking less time to get from one point to another. Then someone said that the world was a village. It took some time for me to understand that more often than not, in any corner of the world that one travelled, one would actually meet somebody he knew, just as he would in a village.
I happen to be on vacation and more often than not I would just find time to sleep and to catch up on my reading. There would be the odd time when a friend or a relative would drag me along to some function or the other. And so it was that my brother who resides in Canada decided to drag me along to a funeral in Brooklyn.
The drive was long; very long because my brother merely cruised along at speed limit pace—just over sixty miles an hour. Everyone has GPS (Global Positioning System) so even if you never went to a place, all you have to do was punch in your destination and this piece of equipment would direct you along the way.
Funerals these days can be fun. It turned out that the woman who died was one of my cousins. Her sister was as casual as they come and she had lost nothing of her Guyanese behaviour. So there we were at their home, after the service at the funeral home, with a barbecue grill ablaze and all the liquor in the world to pass the time.
There were many people at the home and it was impossible not to fall into conversation. So there I was talking to a young girl who was talking about coming home to teach and so gain some experience. I told her that I was working in the local media and as would often happen, people would always want to know what it was that I covered. Media people in North America specialize in beats.
Last year when the Georgetown Public Hospital commissioned its new neonatal department, there was a young doctor out of Canada. He had accompanied Dr Suresh Singh, the man behind the project. I remember interviewing him. He had Guyanese roots—his mother was Guyanese. The little girl with whom I spoke at the funeral was his sister.
The village life went even further. The girl said that her Guyanese descendants were some people named Hill. I told her that way back when, I worked with a headmaster named Thomas (TJ) Hill. She screamed. “That was my grandfather.”
She called her mother. This woman once worked at the Guyana National Co-operative Bank and I remembered her—Roxanne Hill. Then there were the sisters. I remembered that their only brother was killed in the vicinity of the National Cultural Centre by a vehicle driven by one of my schoolmates whom I shall not name at this time.
Last year, I happened to go to the Last Lap—the tail end of the Caribana festival held every year. Not surprisingly, I ran into some people who had fallen off the world. There was I just walking around drinking some strange beer and eating all manner of snacks when a man came up to me. I looked at him and told him that I knew him. “Wha’ you mean you know me Adam?” This was my batch mate, Kenrick Douglas, from the Government Teachers’ Training College. I had not seen him in more than forty years.
Of course, many people would not find this unusual. I go to the annual Queen’s College/Bishops’ High School function and meet friends and class mates from way back. It is always a joy trying to catch up on the missing years. Some of them I may never see again.
There are the odd times when someone surprises me on the subway or at a bus stop. I am tempted to believe that I meet more people with whom I once associated in North America than I would in Guyana. Such are the joys of travelling.
There are also bittersweet moments. Some of my sisters and a brother decided to take my 89-year-old mother on a boat cruise. This cruise was travelling from New York to New Brunswick in Canada. It was five days well spent and before we disembarked and headed back to the concrete jungle, we vowed to do it again next year, and on a bigger scale. This time we were eighteen in all.
A woman died just before we got off the boat in New York. She was cancer-stricken and had invited all her children to take this cruise with her. One son did not make it, but there she was with her other children and some grandchildren.
Her son later told me that she wanted to sing karaoke and she got the chance on the boat. She had a fine time. Three hours before the boat docked at the New York harbour this woman drew her last breath. Some said that she died happy. With some 3,500 people on board not many knew that the woman had died. I did, because the man knew my niece and they had chatted during the cruise.
And from this distance I saw the unraveling of the Amaila hydroelectric project, the continued killing of women by heartless spouses, the senseless speeding on the roads and the ensuing crash that claimed a life, the drowning, and even the gun crimes.
But these episodes paled into insignificance when I convinced myself that life is short and that I should make the best of every day. Those incidents can wait a few days more when I come home.
LISTEN HOW JAGDEO WILL MAKE ALL GUYANESE RICH!!!
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