Life for the Guyanese immigrant is so common place these days. As friends we meet once a year, sometimes 10 years pass, sometimes you're sitting having black cake with neighbors you haven't seen for 30 years, yet it all feels like a minute or two slipped by and the echo of the past sounds less hollow. The group is often made up of people who reside in an odd mixture of countries - other parts of the Caribbean on in the West somewhere, but the conversation is often full of vivid memories of youth - not much of it covers the ongoing lives in those strange places.
The surprises of age show in the self conscious laughter as we recognize the inability to read as before, the bodies' realities, the gray - oh my! Could that be a balding spot; and is that pain in the joints! No, it couldn't be arthritis; those things belong to those older women sitting in the kitchens of our past. None of this matters as we acknowledge the freedom that comes with age.
Barbados is a place for gathering thoughts and moving into the future.
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