The Egg Lady

I was used to being an oddity by the time I became aware of the egg lady. I had been in Ghana for over a year and I had been at my site for about a year even. There were things that became a natural part of my day that theretofore had been stressors and that served to distract me from the normal observations I would make in the course of my life at that age. Before my interactions with the egg lady were over I was to learn to scrutinize my own perceptions of the apparent and the inferred. For that piece of self awareness I owe her so much; I won’t even try to get into the rest of it.

After my arrival at my site in the village of Besoro I was afforded the attention a rock star would get, but I had none of the benefits that went along with celebrity. I found that I was the sole representative of not only my country, but also of my race. I would be followed by children who would chant at me, asking for money and food, and who would scatter in fear if I were to turn my head. People of all ages gave me such attention. The elders told me how to live my life, every preacher made a play to have me attend his church. Women of my age were very forward with their curiosities.

For a long time I was so concerned with personal and professional matters of immediacy and urgency that I was constantly dealing with the moment, even though many of those moments were spent battling a cultural lethargy that I was not yet educated enough to understand. I chalked up some of what I considered then to be victories and got some committees formed and some concrete things built. I stayed busy in my personal life too.

When I finally had found the groove where my life was not a battle of convincing the community that they wanted my way or moment to moment spin control over my interpersonal relationships with authority figures and peers, I began to reap the rewards of the intercultural experience. I settled down to be myself and to live my life as a regular person, but a regular person in a West African village. The people got more accustomed to my being around and allowed me more leeway to live in normalcy. It was then that I noticed the egg lady.

I was in the center of the village for some reason or other. The village center was like the downtown. It was where the transport came and it was where stalls and kiosks were erected to carry out the commerce of the village, like the local Times Square. I was smoking a cigarette and leaning against the post of a building which needed my support more than I could count on its support. Across the street behind a small handmade school desk stood a young woman selling eggs.

She looked to be in her late teens or early twenties. Her comeliness and natural beauty were undeniable. I’m sure I had seen her before, but had not taken specific notice of her because she did not go out of her way to be noticed. She had an air of confidence about her, but not of arrogance. My initial impression was overwhelmed by what met the eye, but my subsequent surreptitious glances stoked further curiosity rather than sated it.

She caught me looking, and as I was rather more confident and less proper than I had been in the past, I winked at her. She was surprised by it I thought, because she laughed. She didn’t laugh coyly or coquettishly as if engaging in a flirtation, but she laughed like a child would when startled with a funny gesture or surprise face. That ingenuous laugh endeared her to me even more.

I took myself away as my piece of business required, but I noted to myself that I should get to know this girl. As was the local custom I sent my second man to make inquiries after her on my behalf. The initial feedback was positive. Apparently her concerns were whether or not I was encumbered with any relationships, what my intentions were with the inquiry, and to let me know that she would not engage in any meetings that were not at first properly chaperoned.

She came to my house and we spent an early evening cooking, discussing our different cultures, laughing in two languages, and laying the foundation for a friendship by clocking shared experience time. The twilight came, there was no electricity, and she took her leave. I walked her to the road. I wanted to kiss her, to touch her, but the opportunity was not presented, and I knew it was calculatedly not presented.

I went out of my way from then on to put myself in her line of sight during the day. As I went on with my business and she with hers, as we carried on our wake-a-day lives the coincidental incidents where we met and were made to interact became quite frequent. We would treat each other with mock aloofness then. Our interactions during the private time we made for each other were far less staged. She was learning about the world beyond the village through me and I was gaining more specific insights into the microcosm of not only Ashanti life, but also the life of the village too.

I can not say that I did not suffer from the same yearnings that all young men in my situation do. Prior to interacting with the egg lady I had not governed the conduct of my part in intercultural interrelationships by locally sociologically accepted rules. I did not press advances if there were no indication of reciprocal interest, but I had become accustomed to the reciprocal interest being present.

I could tell that this beautiful girl was interested in me. I knew she was interested in what I thought, how I felt, who influenced my life, how I would act in certain situations, whether or not I would let circumstances influence and compromise my ethics. She wasn’t interested in whether or not my eyes were actually cold because they were blue or how long it took to grow hair on your arms. As time went on she showed her interest by actually caring for my health and well being.

By the time the coming gloaming would not chase her back to her mother’s house we had built a solid relationship on the foundation of shared experience and mutual respect. She had ensured that our relationship was not marred by a premature acquiescence to the basest inclinations that lurk around relationships once they are known to be more than acquaintance. She was able to manipulate me as if she had known me all of my life. The first time I put my lips to her ear it was to whisper an inside joke in public, and the first time we were breathless in each other’s arms it was from laughter.

I can now admit that I had prejudged her, and that this was a terrible disservice. I had allowed my biological reaction to the text she portrayed to cloud my initial judgment of her capacities. I had allowed experience of others of her ethnicity to fill in blanks around what I perceived her behavior would be. I had allowed experience of others of her beauty to project character traits onto her. All mistaken, all wrong.

I think, all things being equal, that if our relationship were to have progressed at the predictable pace and evolutionary cycle of my previous relationships then we would have known each other as intimate acquaintances and would not have afforded ourselves the opportunity to explore who we truly were and could be to each other. I know that she did not premeditate the progression of our relationship and that her actions and activity was a derivative of who she was as a person.

Slowly, surely, I fell in love with her. I never had a chance.

Now, when I sit in traffic on a frigid night, or battling my way through the current of thronging, angry Boston commuters on the red line I find my mind wandering back to those sultry African nights when I had the undivided attention of a beautiful young woman who wanted to properly and meticulously fall in love. I am often overcome, overwhelmed, by the longing for those lost days, and my greater heart, from my solar plexus to my Adam’s apple becomes a vacuum of need for that beautiful young woman.

I suffer like that until I come through my front door and I am assailed by the savory smell of West African cooking and a different beautiful girl jumps into my arms with the cry of, “Daddy!” And the egg lady, all these years older, but still young and beautiful gives me her trademark smile; a smile that affects me the same way in our Boston suburb as it does in our house back in that village. It serves to remind me that home is truly where the heart is, and that I should find a job closer to home.