[ RF ] A new city , a new beginning , and maybe at last , a place to call home .

Long before I met my wife here — before she'd stopped me on the street so she could tell her friends later that she'd met the exotic, Portuguese version of Desi Arnez — I was someone else. Here, in this new place and on our first date, she said she'd never felt skin as dark and caramel as mine, her hands lingering in the jet black pompadour of my hair. My round face and thick accent an attractive novelty to her. The same accent I'd someday tease my grandchildren with, always leaving the R out of three. That was the moment when I became myself here, and left that someone else of who I was behind. 
 
 He was another me that remained always separate from the family we'd start together. A family that would never know the same dirt roads and humid, stifling jungles, the fat and happy capybaras we chased as children, or even the veranda of my father's plantation home. There. 
 
 In my father's home Cookie always slept in the kitchen. During the colder months he laid in his cot curled up beside the stove. In the suffocation and oppressive jungle heat of the summer, he languished against the back screen door. His skin was as pitch as the centre of a midnight jungle, yet when he moved he glowed like a glint of moonlight. He was too skinny to be taken seriously as a cook, yet every dish he prepared brought a unique sort of pride to my father. `` He's the best cook in Georgetown! And he's ours!'' he'd say. 
 
 Lulu, our Nanny and maid, nursed a deep and seething hatred for Cookie to a fester that she rarely let surface when the family was around. We had to sneak to catch her chiding him, sometimes a slap to the back of his head, more often a quick swipe of his utensils onto the floor. 
 
 Cookie took special care with my brother, sisters and I. Giving us sweets after school and letting us watch him while he hurried under the frenzy of preparing our evening meal. 
 
 `` My father was a slave you know'' Cookie told us one day as he made a curry. He had a way of drawing out stories with words where we almost felt we were watching Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin flicker across the white canvas of our imaginations. He told us about how they harvested the sugar with thick acrid smoke, where only sweet filled their bellies. 
 
 `` Are you a slave?'' I asked. 
 
 He laughed gently and handed me a chickpea. `` No one is anymore'', he said. Later, as we lay in bed under the delicate, willowy flesh of the mosquito net my brother quietly whispered, `` He must be a slave you know. I asked teacher and she says he ca n't vote''. I thought about Cookie below us, dreaming in his well worn cot. `` He does n't have a family anymore you know. Or even his own room. He's always been ours. Pai says he was a little boy when he came''. I listened to my brother's breathing slow and steady itself into sleep and thought about Cookie in the same cot as a boy in our kitchen. 
 
 My father's chain of grocery stores and the wealth it brought and the limitations of childhood insulated me from a growing general unhappiness and bursts of violence. 
 
 Father's home is a consulate now for a small Caribbean country. My granddaughter showed me photos on her computer. She helped me trace the familiar streets between where we played as children, sauntered to school, and shuttled ourselves between my Father's grocery store and home. I gave her small snippets of how it was, but none of us will ever visit. We wo n't recapture our heritage there. We all accepted the bittersweet saudade of it remaining in the past. When my grandchildren ask, I mumble about the government changing and joke lightly about losing the queen. I do n't mention the violence and how half of everyone we know and loved scattered away from where home was. 
 
 When the comfort and length of your new life in a new place extends and unfurls past your old one, age nudges you revisit your memories again and again. You slowly become a seasoned traveller to somewhere new again: the home you have n't visited since you left long ago. So you linger in the familiarity of the there that once was. And you settle into those thoughts and stories from long ago, exploring and relearning them in the same way you did here. 
 
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 I'm stopping there because it's quite late now and I'm unsure of the direction this could continue forward in. I may pick it up later.
