One World

I shuffle down to dinner, expecting to suffer through another meal where my parents mine me for information about my day - while they ignore one another.

Instead, I hear laughter and a hum that I can only describe as “chattering.”

I bounce down the stairs, loud as can be expected to announce my presence. I stop, mid-landing.

Around the dining room table are six children, a bit younger than I, piling their plates high with one of mom’s overblown feasts.

Each has a different skin color than our own and each jabbers in a language I don’t understand.

“What’s all this?” I ask, as I slide into my usual spot at the table.

“We’re celebrating,” dad says, pretending to walk turkey legs across the table and onto a plate of a little dark-skinned girl - her raven hair braided into pigtails, with what looks like feathers and shells woven in - and a boy with black hair and pale skin that’s kinda yellow.

As I take my seat, the boy next to me tugs on my shirtsleeve. His hair is a tight weave of curls and his skin the color of dark roast coffee. His smile is a picket fence of teeth, mostly missing. He’s trying to pass me a heaping bowl of mashed potatoes.

“Kula, kula,” he says, motioning to his mouth with two fingers and his thumb. 

I roll my eyes and get up to leave.

My mother walks behind me and puts her hands on my shoulders and pushes - ever so gently - downward.

“I think it’s obvious that he wants you to join us to eat - and to give thanks for this meal we’ve prepared,” she says, as her grip tightens into my shoulder muscles. “You could at least try and be civil.”

The boy laughs and hands me the potatoes, from which I plop a mound and make a reservoir with the spoon, to hold mom’s gravy, which is in the wobbly hands of a reddish-skinned girl who has a red dot painted on her forehead. Mom’s is the best gravy in the entire world - and I’m spying this girl hard. She sets the bowl at my elbow, takes a healthy scoop and pours a ladleful of deliciousness perfectly into the potato reservoir. Before I can thank her, she pops the ladle into the gravy, then proceeds to cradle my face with her delicate hands. 

“Tum dhany ho,” she says, nearly a whisper. “Tum dhany ho.”

I look confused. Dad smiles. Mom puts her chin in her hands and nods. 

“You are blessed,” she says. 

And I burst into real, honest-to-god tears of joy.