Revelations

We had the address for the mole place in East LA, but the storefront was an income tax office. So we walked to the back and ended up in some guy's backyard. There was a party going on. And a woman walking around with a pan of mole in her hand. Children playing, men sitting around on lawn chairs. I could see women in the kitchen next to the lawn because the door was open and people were walking in and out, older women hovering over a vat of some sort of stew, laughing, tasting, teasing one another. The kitchen had pastel blue walls and fluorescent lighting. They spoke in Spanish, joked with us that we could leave the wine behind. It must happen all the time, people stumbling into this house instead of the mole place at dinner time.

There was something about this particular home though, through a gate, tucked away behind an alley, an extended family getting together on a Sunday night and sharing a meal, the ease of it, the way they laughed when we walked in, like it was something that had been choreographed lifetimes ago and practiced so many times that it had become an easy ritual. It reminded me of India, and I felt such a pang for a sense of home that is different than the home my parents have in Connecticut. It was the feeling of the home I maybe could have grown up in, did grow up in when I was very little. And I missed my grandparents, and our gated verandah with the guava tree and the smells of dinner being prepared in the late afternoon. It wasn't one of those quiet disclosures of time, a slow realization of something missed, it was more like a punch in the gut, the recognition of a broken trajectory, and for a moment, I felt like I couldn't breathe.