Last Sunday Pocket of Bolts and I had dinner with my Korean cousin Ae. This was actually a very new experience for me. She was in Chicago with some girlfriends of hers from high school, visiting another of their friends who has settled here. She made a very particular effort to schedule a visit with me as well. I was puzzled but intrigued. I remember her fondly even from childhood--incoherent impressions, but just a feeling that she was very older sisterly, kindly, safe. I was never especially close to any of my cousins though. I think the major impression she must have had of me was that I was "very shy."
We met her at her hotel and walked down to Quartino, a really nice Italian restaurant. It was raining hard. I had never been to Quartino before, but Pocket of Bolts, who did all the research for this particular outing, had very nice things to say about it. It was all family-style, meant for sharing, but not the kind of portions you associate with that. It was more like an Italian version of tapas. We got an a la carte antipasto plate (PoB chose the stuff--it was SO GOOD), fried polenta sticks, arugula pizza, grilled octopus, and shrimp risotto. A nice bottle of not expensive wine to top it off. I was nervous. We kept Ae talking about her career--being a CPA for a major firm, switching to startups in SF for a while, not hitting the business cycle right, getting married and having kids, going back to a steadier job again with another major company. It was interesting. I hadn't really been aware of any of it. Not indifference, just general obliviousness. It reminds me that I have through most of my life been weirdly oblivious of many other people's lives, even other people that it would make sense to care about. It's like the bandwidth for my gossiping ability is really really narrow...
We chatted about other stuff--advice from her about starting a family, stuff about her kids, about other cousins. She told us that if we were going to have kids, we needed my parents to live closer by. Also, she told Pocket of Bolts he would absolutely have to help out around the house and do his share of the cooking. Pocket of Bolts, who does 90% of the cooking and about 75% of the other housework (especially lately) bit his tongue and nodded politely. It was very funny. I don't think Ae (a rather traditional sort of gal, I think) can even conceive of what a degenerate wife I am. Oh well, PoB seems to like me okay this way. I have the best will in the world to do things... I just get oblivious....
Ae really wanted to have coffee or something afterwards. I was teaching in the morning, so a drink wasn't really in the cards. I was also nervous at having probably exhausted everything I could think of to say to her. But a Korean gal tends to get her way, when she gets her mind set on something. It was still raining. We wandered around looking for someplace that was open and looked interesting--ended up sitting at the bar at Ruth's Chris because why not. Ae and I split a bread pudding and had decaf cappuccinos. PoB had a martini. I am not accustomed to sitting at a bar--it seems so ... exposed ... but Ae promptly made friends with the bartender, who turned out to be (as I suppose bartenders often are) a very gregarious, interesting, friendly sort. He seemed quite happy to talk and chat with us.
Ae gave us a long and kind of adorable disquisition on how one should always sit at the bar because it's more fun and you can still get most or all of the menu but with less formality. She clearly has such different associations with it than I do (well, I have next to none), memories of courting her now-husband, good times in the pre-child-rearing days. That, plus another nice experience I had recently, and after all I may come 'round to it after all. I mean, the bartender was so nice he didn't even mind that Ae and I weren't drinking.
We parted with the assurance that we would try to hang out again at Christmas. Ae and her husband, like PoB and I, alternate Christmases with the different families, but it seems like we're on a convergent cycle. Perhaps, if I'm not too much in a state of post-dissertational collapse, I'll actually try to make it happen. Certainly Facebook makes things much easier to organize...
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