Ohhhh Jamaica

The highlight of my week has been the fruiting Mulberry tree just outside my window. I can scope out particularly bountiful branches as I dress in my room- the boughs easily bend so that seemingly unreachable treasures become sweet and warm treats. A simple reward as I pass in and out of the yard routinely every day. Mulberries are easily my favorite berry, and they remind me of my grandmother’s house upstate, before the tornado knocked their impressive tree down.

Also, pear season is gaining momentum, guava and plum too (plums in Jamaica are nothing like the type you’d imagine from the states… green and oval with a hard texture similar to an apple or American pear). I got laughed at the other day for mashing up my pear with scallion, salt and pepper. ‘It’s a sandwich!’ I reasoned, ‘It looks disgusting!’ they replied. I decided not to point out that I thought their tin mackerel and tuna fish with rice lunch was more disgusting to me.

Alex sent me a package with the game Set in it and I’ve been teaching the kids at the summer program how to play. Teaching them is frustrating, since the game is very hard to pick up on and requires a lot of attention to detail, but a few kids are picking up on it and they ask me any time they see me if I have Set with me. Last night was ‘games night’- kids play monopoly, cards, puzzles etc while adults and older kids play dominoes. Of course I had Set, and two of the boys from the program were getting pretty good, so I decided to play instead of just deal. They got a kick out of getting beaten which I found surprising, but the competition was the fun part and they tried very hard to ‘beat teacher’. By the end of the night I was surrounded by a group of young men shouting ‘Set!’ and trying desperately to understand the game. A few picked up on it, which was cool to witness. I almost got my nose broken during a particularly spirited race to point out a Set of cards on the board. Watch out Jamaica, a new game craze is coming your way.

A man who noticed my arm hair dubbed me ‘fuzzy’. As this is an age old insecurity of mine, I’m not super psyched about this nickname, however, he said he liked it- and made a few lewd comments to support that statement. Oooooooh Jamaica.

This is a leap-frogging random thoughts kind of post, so I leave you with this quote from one of my favorite movies, Big Fish:
”They’d talk about just about anything… except for religion.”
”Why don’t they talk about religion?”
”It’s rude to talk about religion, you never know who you’re going to offend.”

This quote rang true when the third question posed to me by a complete stranger was: “are you a Christian?” my response to that question is always that I was raised Catholic, sometimes (and this particular time) I add that I stopped going to church regularly when I was about 17 (or that I haven’t been to church in a while). The stranger’s supplemental question was one for the books: “Is that because you started having sex?”

Oooooh Jamaica.