THROUGH ROSE TINTED GLASSES…

Mid week, sometime in the late afternoon, when I was lounging around the house wondering whether to take on the all consuming job of soaking the roots of my orchids in water, the phone rang. It was my Kung Fu friend. She was in the neighbourhood and wanted pop in and have a look at my garden. Now…why was she so interested in my garden?…I suspect it was my blog…my oohing and ahing about my scented garden, colourful blooms, vegetables and fruit trees and birds and bees. She’s a very down to earth person with no frills and nonsense about her. I, on the other hand can get a little carried away by my imagination….and so therein lay the fear that my credibility was hanging in the balance. But then again, if she came in the morning when colours were more vibrant and bird calls more melodious, she would indeed witness the full glory of my garden. But now, it was the time of day, when the sun was sinking behind the roofs of the houses, the colours of flowers muted, the bees holed in their hives and the birds hidden in the foliage of trees, chirping quietly and preparing for slumber.

I opened the back gate for her. The neighbours were sitting on their balcony and watching. I dread to think what would happen if my neighbours knew English and stumbled upon my blog. Just so you know, they’re incredibly wonderful people and if I were sitting on their balcony I would probably be doing the same thing. Anyway, my Kung Fu friend walked in and as we moved away from the gate, she whispered…` Ahh so those are the neighbours.’…She found it delightfully entertaining. I was relieved because the bit that I had said about my neighbours in one of my posts, was actually playing out in front of her eyes. I wasn’t spinning yarns like she suspected with my cooking, when I couldn’t come out with the recipes to support claims of having cooked delectable dishes. As I had mentioned before, my Kung Fu friend is over zealous with evidence, detail and accuracy, which I am sadly lacking in.

But I was proud of my roses. There is an old Persian proverb that says…` The world is a rose, take time to smell it and pass it to your friends’…and that was exactly what I intended to do. So with a generous gesture, a sweep of my arm, I invited her to admire my blooms…` You seem to like roses,’ she commented… `Yes! Yes!’ I responded, pleased that she realized I wasn’t making up stories… `Smell them! Smell them!’ I urged her on eagerly. She took a whiff of my peppery whites and shook her head…` can’t smell a thing’…then the floral scented lilacs…` uh maybe just a hint of a smell’…the shy pinks…`hmm not really’…the musky seductive reds with velvety petals…`yes a little’…the yellowy ones ringed with a frilly pink border exuding a buttery vanilla fragrance…` yes this one smells,’ she confirmed. But I was hoping for more, expecting something more effusive than just laconic remarks. I then raised doubts about her olfaction…her smell receptors… but she brushed away my remarks and continued sniffing without smelling.

Smelling roses is like smelling wine. It’s about applying your nose to them and drawing in breath as if it were your last. You acquire a nose for it by constantly burrowing it into buds that are just opening up and inhaling deeply and allowing your perceptions to take over, offering subtle intimations …delicately floral, earthy like after the first rains, spicy like tea and cinnamon…an endless allusion to exquisite nuances of lingering and fleeting smells. It should then be followed by an unrestrained exuberance of verbal outpourings. It is expected of the smeller by the grower. But sadly, nothing was forthcoming. My present cleaning lady, however, is a master of this art. Before she starts work on Thursday mornings, she makes a beeline for my roses, nuzzles her nose into the new blooms, drinks in the smells with her eyes closed and exclaims in superlatives…` AHH…AHH… THAVMA! THAVMA!’ [ IT’S A MIRACLE! IT’S A MIRACLE! ]

I was a tad disappointed, but never mind. I invited my Kung Fu friend in and we started chatting as we normally do. Finally when she got up to leave, she caught sight of my long dining room table and said…` Ah, this is where you run around,’ referring to the blog post where I talked about Yiannis and I jogging around the table to get our pulses racing. I could see from her face that she wasn’t quite impressed, especially since she, worked out for an hour, doing her Bruce Lee moves, kicking in the air while twirling some sort of pole, like in the Chinese films. At that point I felt the need to  demonstrate the complexity of our moves …how we raced hard on the spot taking small mincing steps forward around the huge table…once , twice, three times and at the end of it, bent double, holding our sides to catch our breath like sprinters, after doing the hundred metres. She smiled and gave me one of those indulgent looks and made for the door. No! No! I wasn’t going to allow her this easy victory. I stopped her in her tracks flashing my trump card…`WE ALSO DO THIS!’…I grasped the rails of the spiral staircase and did our squatting number…rapidly going up and down, hoping to gain ground, even put me in the lead…But from the look on her face, I could see I was no match for my pole spinning friend.

But don’t get me wrong. My Kung Fu friend and I go a long way back and have shared some memorable moments together, although we are so unlike each other…she views the world through a magnifying glass, when she chooses to and …I view the world through rose tinted glasses, when I choose to. But somehow we always find common ground. Before the lockdown, we used to meet at the cafeteria in the park in Chania. I remember the time and another one following it, when I thought she was late for our appointment. I had arrived on time and looked around, but she was nowhere in sight, which was highly unusual for someone who goes by the book. She was normally there well ahead of me. So I called her and she answered immediately. Not only did her voice come over loud and clear but it had a distinct echo…resonating from the table next to me. She had been sitting there all along, straight and sophisticated. It was half past six in the evening, the sun was dipping behind the tall ficus trees, dappling their glossy leaves with gold and we had been sitting and waiting… next to each other…in dark sunglasses…unable to recognize one another.

Alas!!! This was the root of our problem…the epic problem of the `gentler sex’…grappling with our age…hiding behind shades. Then as dusk gathered, we had to remove our powered sunglasses. Did we switch to our regular ones? NO!… WHY?…Because they were boring and ageing and didn’t go with our earrings. After all, we were walking home and could easily find our way back even with eyes closed. So there we were, our glasses safely tucked away in our bags, walking home with blurry vision, using other receptors…somewhat like the echolocation of bats and other nocturnal creatures to navigate our way home. So my Kung Fu friend and I, may not be that different after all…when we choose to.

Cheers!