So It Go

Ignore all the corny Confucius jokes in fractured English; this was really a man with a startlingly brilliant mind about the human condition. 

Most of the time, people appear in your life almost as in a passing parade, they come and they go. 

Recently I spent two days in Florida, two days in New Jersey and five days in Maine, mostly just travelling about, noticing Uncle Sam’s ways, reflecting on back home ways, eating some good food, checking out the fall colours in the leaves – in other words, essentially down time.

Visitors getting into a car in Guyana for the first time are often left shocked, perhaps even stunned, by our driving habits.

Ideas for ‘So It Go’ columns come from anywhere and everywhere.

It’s probably impossible to start with a digression – a digression means you’re departing from something that has already begun – but allow me to infuriate somebody by starting with a digression anyway (creative licence), and here it is: I hate the term ‘remigrant’; it sounds like a concept in a sociology paper, or some species of wandering fish.

Last week, in a column entitled ‘Knowing the Fine Fine,’ I made the point that to know any society, including this one, you had to remain imbedded in it for a long time, and that therefore when resident Guyanese tell expatriate Guyanese that they “don’t understand Guyana,” the comment is accurate.

Usually it’s clear where I’m going when I start off one of these columns, but sometimes I start out one place which leads to somewhere else; today is one of the latter.

Sometimes you meet a person, and you mesh instantly.  It was like that with a man named Ormand Panton I met in Grand Cayman many years ago.

I was born at Hague and spent the very early part of my life there, but in my teenage years the Martins family lived at New Road, Vreed-en-Hoop.

I lived for more than 25 years in the Cayman Islands where tourism is almost 50% of the economy.

In a recent column, where I referred to some of the differences between living in Guyana and living outside, space limitations prevented me from mentioning an importance difference – marketing.

I call him “Kraws” but you know him as Ken Corsbie, Guyana’s premier storyteller/comedian who celebrated his 80th birthday recently, and I’m touched that so many of you got in touch with him on that occasion.