Status Updates From The Anthropologists

“Here in front of the greenhouses is my favorite spot. When the suns out, you pull up a chair and sit alongside the others. We’re a community of sun worshippers. We recognize one another. We take pleasure each other’s basking. The true baskers don’t do anything at all. You see? No books, no newspapers, no phones. Only the sun.”

“ Whenever we talked about this time in our lives, we would be incredulous at our hospitality, but also a bit mournful at our loss of curiosity. Our tolerance to listen to anything, to be engaged with the world without calculation.”

“I wondered whether this was how some women felt about the prospect of having children: that they could easily imagine a space for it.”

“I didn’t tell anyone else. There was the problem of expressing my devastation. Grandparents were meant to be old; they were meant to get sick. This was among the sorrows of life for which outsiders were not expected to pause their routines, to inconvenience themselves.”

“I’m sorry you’re upset, he said, even though he knew I hated this particular remark. It was the type of thing the foreigners had learned to say from their hours of therapy, acknowledging the other person without really bringing themselves any closer. It was the surest way to make one lonely.”