09/17/05 06:54 -05:00 GMT

Dinner and Death

Good evening Reader. I'm going to sit down to a lovely meal with my wife and mother-in-law. We're going to have some nshima with beef. It smells delicious! Nshima is a traditional staple food that accompanies most meals in Zambia, and goes by other names in much of the sub-Saharan region. It is maize, ground into corn meal. Then the meal is put in boiling water at regular intervals, with a lot of stirring until the mixture is saturated more with the meal than water. So it results in thick, hot pillows of meal, the consistency of porridge, but even thicker. It resembles our grits, or corn meal mush, but it's thicker. The way it's ladled out makes me think of the "hot pillow" term. When you get the Nshima, you scoop a piece off with your fingertips, and then you dip and grab whatever accompanies the nshima. Tonight it's ox tail, which is a very fatty beef that tastes delicious and smells fantastic.  Bon apetit, mon ami, et nous parlons après.

Dinner is over, and it was satiating.

I was just looking outside, and there was a firefly expiring in the darkness, on the ground. It's light was like a last dying ember in the bottom of a fire pit. It pulsed, sometimes bright, and sometimes barely visible, at irregular intervals, so much like a heart beat that it brought me back to the time when Courtney Kelly Cohen passed away in front of my eyes, her father falling to his knees, an expression of loss and pain on his face that will stay with me as long as Courtney stays with him. The light continued and ebbed, and shone brightly, then sighed forever.

"She's gone," he cried.