Every week, my father meets with a gaggle of about eight Trinidadian buddies on Zoom, to attach and, as we Trinis say, “ol’ talk.” Somehow, even if they’ve been assembly like this for over a decade, I knew nothing of this gathering till just lately.
“Karen, you’ve never seen anything like it,” my mother advised me. “Sometimes I go hide in a corner and pretend I’m reading a book, but mostly I’m just eavesdropping on their conversation. They are constantly teasing each other and arguing and laughing and talking over each other.” She shook her head. “For hours, the whole lot of them just get louder and louder, and all I can do is sit there and laugh.”
“How do you know these people?” I requested my dad.
“Oh, some of them are friends from high school,” he stated. “And some of them are folks I met during my career.” My dad had labored a petroleum engineer. Given the significance of the vitality trade to the Trinidadian economic system, he had change into well-known within the nation because of this.
“Is everyone in the group in oil and gas?” I requested.
“No. One is a psychiatrist. One is a doctor, and one is a dentist. There’s an economist. All had very successful careers but are now all retired and have been for decades. We used to meet in person at a clubhouse called the Cosmos Club in Port-of-Spain at about 4:30 in the afternoon every Friday. We’d sit at the bar, and one person would bring some street food in. I would join them every time I was back home in Trinidad, about four times a year. But then, when COVID hit and Trinidad went into lockdown, the club closed. So we began meeting on Zoom.”
“What do you guys talk about?”
“Well, it’s just a lime!” “Lime” is a Trinidadian phrase we use to imply a “gathering,” however with a particular emphasis on connecting with one another. “And you know what happens in a lime,” my dad continued. “Usually there’s food and drinks, and ol’ talk. And ol’ talk in Trinidad is always about a subject or two or three, often going on Concurrently.”