Sunday, October 01, 2006

Letter from a restaurant

Monsieur, the day is over, I worked at the investment bank, bought a sweater, walked city blocks until too hungry to continue. I am sitting in a corner of a Parsee Restaurant that drew me with an unusual warmth in its Indian colours and curtained light writing to you.

I sit at a small table covered with clear plastic under which a string tablecloth, woven in a loose stitch with an orange central flower radiating out in a circular pattern that stands out from the white stitching, lies. Lifting the glass stopper on a bottle of olive oil, I pour a delicate gold stream over my mostly lettuce salad, and then, from the other bottle, fresh lime juice. When the glass of housewine arrives, it is slightly vinegary, and I wonder if they bottled it themselves. The beef Keba is tender, the white rice is intermixed with yellow orange grains cooked with saffron. On the edge of the oval dish is a stewed tomatoe.

The patrons consist of an older retired couple, two young men in suits talking about business, and two Indian families who sit at tables pulled together. My favourites are a girl and boy, both perhaps 18 months old, whose words consist of 'blaaah...' and 'ma-ma-ma.' I think they are told they are too noisy for the woman in the corner because I am pointed at and they both suddenly turn and look at me with wide brown eyes. I smile, they smile, and then they run around the tables until their mothers grab them and put them in the high chairs. The women each have long shiny dark hair and are young and beautiful and are dressed in new sweats, unlike their husbands in their starch white shirts and office trousers. Throughout the meal, they continue to expend energy tying to quieten the children while their husbands talk. I think of an always-smiling young Parsee woman I met at a job recently and her wedding that week in a dress of white lace; afterwards, she said, she was changing into a mustard honey sari with gold threads sewn through it, the colours of the table cloth and the fragrant rice before me. I wonder about the Parsees in India; my young soon-to-be married friend originally from Sri Lanka, and if the life ahead of her will be similar to the families seated near me.

The young children cannot sit still in silence. I ruminate on what I am observing, mon cher. Why do we feel we have to contain energies that are different to our own? Why do we need to bring others down to our level? Why do we try to silence each other in the ways that we do?

These are questions that are haunting me, as you know, Monsieur.

I watch the fathers' irritation with the noisy children; the mothers' attempts to stop them from crying. What is this process of containing that begins so young?

The waiter, who can barely keep up with the orders, and runs from table to table, and the man behind the counter, who is also the cook, look like brothers. They have just opened this restaurant, on borrowed money perhaps. Business is already going well.

14 comments:

  1. It is wonderful to look for balance, and I enjoy all that weighs on all sides in this scene, from the post-work walk, to the aspirations, via our society's seeming inability to allow multiple generations to comfortably inhabit the same space.

    And the description is so rich and yet, yet, we might drop into the role of any of these characters, there are so many points of access for the reader of this tale.

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  2. Eating as a spectator sport with philosophical overtones: I like it.

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  3. Living with and around others, we make compromises. Trade offs. Because we are not alike and don't experience the same things. As an arbitrary example which I thought of only because this post mentions noise, I am not comfortable in my skin with extremely loud noise. I have friends who seem completely oblivious and impervious to the continuous, loud screeching of their children that puts me completely on edge. It is out of the range of the usual. My own child didn't behave that way, perhaps having inherited my sensibilities. At what cost to others do I defend my own comfort? And at what cost do they defend theirs? And what is the cost to the children of either not learning what makes others uncomfortable, or being silenced? These are difficult questions you ask.

    Beautiful descriptions in this piece.

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  4. Anonymous2:42 PM

    There is a haunting, vintage flair to this composition and I like the format, indeed so.

    Blessings~

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  5. Twoberry, I agree, and do like that story.

    Narrator, thank you - this kind of writing is fairly easy, and I forget often to include it along with the much more difficult poetic philosophical pieces! :-)

    MB, that's a tough one. For me the sound of an incessant TV, heavy traffic, airplanes, & construction are the difficult ones - children playing loudly or crying doesn't bother me (as long as no-one's getting hurt). These two children were about a year and a half old and, with tiny vocal chords, not very loud, really they weren't. They really weren't bothering anyone in the restaurant except their fathers, who would look over crossly, and their mothers, whose job it was to keep them quiet. The way they kept them quiet was to constantly put food into their mouths - especially what looked like chocolate milkshakes through a straw. If I was a little kid, I'd sure hoot and holler for chocolate milkshake! Personally, I would have preferred a little hollering than seeing food used as a pacifier, but that's just me, and, as I said, my ears don't mind the sound of children in any of their openly emotional outbursts or gleeful laughter. I can see that noisy children must be difficult with your sensitivity to sound, though, and feel for you with this.

    Many thanks, laurieglynn -

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  6. Brenda, I agree with you! I spent years teaching young children and actually enjoy the sounds of children — don't mind the usual outbursts, happy, sad or angry. The example I mentioned happens to be extreme. My point was simply like what you mentioned — when something does set you off, where does your need stop and theirs begin, or vice versa. I don't really know the answer... Hope you are feeling a bit better.

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  7. MB, my kids are older, my son 19, my daughter 15, so perhaps memory dims, but I honestly don't recall being overloaded aurically by screaming children... because I did my day a week at a co-op nursery school, I learnt very quickley to step in and distract an over-wrought child by taking their inconsolable misery seriously and then shifting their attention to something more fun - if it was 'missing Mommy' I tended to say, 'Oh, Mommy misses you so much too!' I don't know how often that caused the tears to stop as this new thought, Mommy misses me!, entered the slipstream of developing consciousness. In friend's houses or the playground, I'd just go over and ask what was wrong and go from there.

    I tend to be like that, though.

    When a group of teens was in the alley out back talking and laughing loudly recently and I heard what sounded like slapping and weird noises I immediately went out in my slippers and stuck my head around the gate and asked, "Is everything alright?" They all looked at me. "I heard slapping." "Oh, I was clapping," one girl says, and shows me. "Oh, ok, I just wanted to make sure everything was alright..." and as I went back in the old neighbour next door whispered over the fence in the darkeness, "Shhh... turn your light off, the cops are coming." Because I stuck my head out back, the teens moved on and thankfully weren't there when the cops arrived. They weren't doing anything wrong - just talking, laughing, perhaps smoking, who cares.

    So, oh, when a kid's screaming, it's probably ok to just go over and crouch down and ask what's wrong, listen, suggest whatever, watch the situation resolve itself with some attention, and then suggest another game... I can't recall that I ever lost any friends doing this- usually more like gratitude. Sometimes mothers are just too tired, ya know... oh, do we know!

    *hugs xo

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  8. Anonymous9:57 PM

    Ah, but Brenda, silence is our only capital. Silence is all we come with, and all we leave with. It's what guides us, protects us, revives us, and restores us. And it's in such tragically short supply! Reflect on all the sounds, and all the words, that have existed since the beginning of time, or merely since the beginning of you. What benefit did they confer? None. What is better now than it was at the start, thanks to sound or to words? Nothing. If someone is indeed trying to silence you, accept that marvelous gift (silently, of course)!

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  9. Anonymous10:04 PM

    Why do we try to silence each other in the ways that we do?

    . . . . expecting an answer? Well, it is a darn good question since I have been spending most of my life trying to get people to "open up." Guess what, I just had a thought that I can hardly imagine you "silencing" anyone, perhaps in the past, but not now. Cheers, Bill

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  10. Beautiful entry. Energies are sometimes hard to gauge. Sometimes they meld beautifully with all the other textures; sometimes they grate against them. Then one gets into issues of transcendance....

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  11. Danae, There's silence, and silence is beauty, and I meditate every day into that deep silence, it's crucial to be in relation to it, to be nourished by it, as you say, but in a group where everybody's 'loved,' 'cared about,' 'acknowledged,' to find yourself being 'stonewalled,' 'ignored deliberately,' 'trivialized,' and you're told it's not because you've transgressed negatively but that you do something rather well and so you're not welcome, that's a different sort of silence, and it's meant to hurt, and it does hurt. You have to withdraw; what else are you supposed to do? Into the deepness of rupture, silence.

    I'm not sure who you are, Danae, or what site you've come from, but your comment doesn't seem to relate to this post about eating dinner in a resturant, observing the social controls already being applied to young children.

    Insisting that higher, brighter, younger energies operate at our slower levels isn't the silence you speak of. Children reach exuberantly into the world, as they are meant to, if all goes well.

    Sameness isn't silence. It's repression.

    Are we all here to help each other unfold? To encourage the other to unfold their gifts?

    Namaste.

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  12. e_journeys, thank you. Ah, transcendance... now that's pause for thought.

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  13. Anonymous5:15 AM

    Oh, I'm Danae Mavrides, an occasional reader who enjoys your posts via Bloglines. I don't remember how I originally came here though. Yes, my comment was in direct response to this question in your above post: "Why do we try to silence each other in the ways that we do?"

    Unfortunately, I don't understand what you're describing regarding a group. It sounds as if your feelings were hurt, and for that I'm sorry. But being ignored, and withdrawing, and rupture cannot be silence. How could silence exist when a person remains (i.e., someone who can be ignored, repressed, etc.)?

    As for meditation, yes, it is sometimes a useful self-help tool for attempting to maintain a certain degree of emotional stability, of course. But it's not silence.

    Finally, no, we're not here to help each other unfold or to encourage others to unfold their gifts. Such "gifts" are simply fool's gold and pearls of paste. They attract and entertain, decorate and delight, and sometimes even get us through the night. But mostly they just distract us from...silence.

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  14. Danae, I am so glad you came back and wrote more. Since your first comment was here, and I didn't know you, I wasn't sure. In the past few months I have had some painful experiences with group dynamics and have chosen to withdraw. If this is possible on the NET. The emotional pain, however, has been sufficient for me to start a book about 'silencings.'

    Those kinds of silencings are not what you are talking about.

    I am intrigued and fascinated by the totality of the silence you speak of. It seems deeply spiritual. What monks who never speak would begin to learn; what a hermit in cave might finally hear.

    Is silence only described through the 'negative path' - what it's not; because it's inaccessible to language?

    Do you keep a blog? How do I find you?

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A Pulsing Imagination - Ray Clews' Paintings

A video of some of my late brother Ray's paintings and poems I wrote for them. Direct link: https://youtu.be/V8iZyORoU9E ___