by Lajos Becsi

Created on: January 05, 2010

A Thank You Letter.

Dear Attila,

Your Grae’gran’ma Dodo would say you lead a charmed life!

She’d say even your take-out bleeps turn out brilliant and beaut…

You - or Pa Xmas - very recently gave me a li'l bag of Nannah's Orchard’s, bought at the Cargillton Farmers’Sunday Market, believing it was going to be the Chinese Tea grown and fabricated down South by that Chinese immigrant family I was raving about.

You - amongst the very few - knew how close to death I was a while ago, and you it was who told me to ignore that silly notion.

“ ‘Cause you needed to talk wimmee…”

"They" had waffled – the next morning - that I had miraculously pulled through.

That's as may be.

You and I know I did not have the time to die, for I had decided I had to tell you so much more.

And you began to understand an old codger of 92 at the time, and you began to want to trust me, mind, I repeat: want to trust me.

(It's different from just "trusting me." Considering we both know that both Dodo and I aren’t in actual fact your great grand parents, just very old friends of your real – but dead great grand parents.

The difference is that both of us still want to remember you wet your diapers sitting on my lap, not once, but many a time…)

And when I came out of hospital, you, of all people around me, began to help me fulfill my temporal needs, even in absolutely more meaningful manner than all my own children had ever in their lifetime chosen to do. They had deftly kept asking the rhetorical question "Yar orrite then Dad? Tell us when you want 'neething."

And I, sensing I began to smell a rat - unknowing that they were scheming up something - now you and I and a few others do know WHAT they were busy raking together -, I steadfastly answered what they so greedily wanted to hear: “No thanks, I'll be alright."

Which I damn well was NOT!

Never mind.

This is only the intro to the lovely story I have to tell you, sort of rough background strokes of scenery for a lovely tale you can tell your great grand children, one good Christmas Day, perhaps 100 years from now, I reckon.

You’d be 122! Why not?

And I 193! Why not?

-

When I opened your parcel I immediately smelled it wasn't tea, but its perfume was what I then and there recalled to be the soft but urgent odour of an essential oil of a fruit-potpourri which Dodo daubed on her index fingers and then proceeded to rub behind

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