What details of your life could you pay more attention to?

It seems to me that my life, although not at all what I expected it to be, is full of small moments of pleasure, little joys, that make my days worth a good night’s sleep and a sound cup of coffee in the morning. Maybe it is too little to settle for.

I am watching,very slowly, a K- Drama called Crash Landing On You that is so romantic, so heartbreaking, that at the end of each episode I am left astonished. I am watching it so slowly because at one point I could not bear its uncertainty, and watched the last episode to make sure it all ended well. And I began three others, some of which I have already concluded, while prolonging this very best of the best serial. It is a story of the kind I love best, a love crossing boundaries, that takes a very long time to resolve. I have loved love stories like this since I was seventeen, love stories that taxes its lovers cruelly by society, in which the lovers sometimes wait a lifetime to find their happiness. It is why I always rooted Odysseus to return to Penelope.

But my life is nothing like the sweet romances that I am lately watching with such delight. My life has no romance, but it does have comfort. Even as I watch a crucial scene from the drama, tears streaming, my cat comes over to investigate, make sure I am okay. I went to the beach for the first time today, in a very long time, to see the ocean,and video-called my mom, so she could see the ocean as well. I had dinner with a friend yesterday, glad to break bread in good company, seeing other people, saying hello, These moments in my life are precious, worth paying attention to. They remind me I am not adrift, alone in the world.

I sense I will live alone, though, for the rest of my life, but as I type this, my cat yowls in her own pain downstairs. She is getting old, and not always certain what she wants. I call to her, come puppy, because sometimes puppy just becomes a generic term of endearment. She had been ill for a while, and although she is doing well lately, I wonder if her ailment flares up enough mysteriously to make her cry. Or is it she suddenly realizes she is alone, while the other cat and I are upstairs, and cries out in confusion? Usually, it is only one cry she lets out before settling for the night.

So I think I will pay attention— ah, a second cry, and I’ve brought her upstairs, and now the two cats are hissing at one another. They are mother and daughter, used to having their own space, although on a rare moment, they will lie side by side peacefully.

How to not notice, how not to pay attention in this wild and wooly world of ours?

What are your favorite types of foods?

Once I was asked what food I could not live without, and I did not respond with “chocolate.” Or cake. I answered, yogurt, and that answer still holds. Yogurt, Nigel Slater, one of my favorite food writers, says is what he starts and often ends the day with. Yogurt with berries and honey, yogurt added to soup or spicy lentils, made into a lassi, or simply eaten with rice. Curd ( yogurt) rice, or Thayir Sadam, was the way I ended most meals growing up. Tempered with mustard seed in hot oil, with green chilis I carefully fished out, and eaten with spiced vegetables, or lentil broths.. I was not one for too spicy foods as a youngster , so I tended to wash the baby mango pickle under the tap before eating it as a condiment to the rice.

Yogurt was the all in one remedy for stomach ache. My mother heated milk every day to make the evening yogurt, but I have never made it myself. Instead I buy plain yogurt in quart containers weekly. Sometimes I get the kind with the cream on top. My niece once asked me on the phone what I planned to eat for dinner. She was in New Jersey, and I was in Colorado. I told her. She said, “and you can have yogurt for dessert, and if you were very good, you can have honey with it.” She was three or four at the time. Truer words never spoken.

Mornings would be my go to answer for a favorite time of day, because of coffee, the light, the quiet. Morning is when you discover if had snowed the night before.

But when I wander in the garden on a summer night that still has light, when I offhandedly tend to the flowers, stooping behind the rose bush to pick away the leaves with black spot, breathing the cool air, then I get enchanted. I get struck by the quality of the time, the beauty of the light.

I am waiting for a melon to ripen in the vegetable plot. I think tomorrow might be the day. It should drop off its stem when it ready. I am tempted to take the scissors to it, but I will resist. Have provided a bed, and am willing the beetles to keep away. Two more are growing, but at a slow, slow pace.

What happens to the garden at night?

As it turned out, I did not resist. I cut the melon and took it home, and rose a sea of doubt. It is supposed to rain hard, but all I see are blue skies behind the clouds, and some sun.

There is a chance the melon will taste of cucumber, because a cucumber plant grew near it. So much chance and probability in this world. And there is the law of averages, which I imagine is the general weight of history and predictability. When did I stop writing fiction? Months or years? What was the day, and why was that that significant?