Tirza ~ May 17

 

How do you know each other? Invariably, people want to know.

Tsela is a few decades younger than I.  I’m a white and Jewish, she is Tibetan and Belgian.

We confuse them. We are affectionate, and laugh a lot.  She says things that make me admonish, TSELA!  She often reaches into my purse to fish out what I don’t yet know I need.

How do you know each other?

Why do people have to catalog relationships?  Maybe the adopted daughter.  Or are they lovers?  Which is it?  Not much in the multiple choice.

The truth is I hired Tsela as an assistant to my business when she lived here, married to a local boy.  She was trying to start her own business as an agent to foreign actors, but primarily worked in a gift store in High Falls.  Her English wasn’t very good at all.  I don’t remember how I met her, but we invited her to interview for the job, and she claims I laid out samples of each one of our artists on the table, and asked her to tell us what she thought.  She picked two as her favorites.  I hired her on the spot. 

Molly, my other assistant, wasn’t convinced.  But I knew that the handful of French speakers would like her, especially Benoit, also Belgian.  And besides, apparently when I used no logic I got the best assistants. 

When I used logic, things didn’t turn out so well.  But that’s another story. 

Molly didn’t make it easy for Tsela.  I had to carve out a territory for her.  In addition, she was happy to pick up Matthew from school in her old black Camry with the passenger door that no longer opened.  It gave her a chance to have a smoke on the way too.  Matthew would wait for the sputtering car to pull up and climb in the window, and off they went.  She was happy to take Rex out too.  

When her marriage fell apart, she went back to Brussels.  I'm going to miss you more than Tim! 

We stayed in touch, and we'd have lunch when she came for a visit.  

She went to China and managed to smuggle herself into Tibet without speaking either language, to find out what had happened to her father who had disappeared in fighting for a free Tibet.  No one in the family had the curiosity or courage to investigate, and in her doing so, and in writing about it, she caught the ire of both her biological and adopted families. I invited her to come and stay with me so she could write.  

Her book began as a romance, inspired by having fallen in love with a guy from Wales, during a football match in Paris. She tested the love, and clearly understood that she had been replaying the betrayal central in her life.  In trying to repair the damage, she took to writing about it, hoping for redemption in fiction.  And perhaps forgiveness.