Love, Lust 'n Geology (1ST DRAFT)

Chapter 12: First time at Tom's

Chapter 12: First time at Tom's

It took them barely ten minutes to pull up in front of Tom's house. Of course, she didn't tell him that she already knew where he lived, and simply followed his truck.

When she walked into his house, she had the impression of everything being dated. Not dirty, though! No, the place looked clean and orderly enough - certainly far more than she herself would have been able to maintain had she lived on her own - but as if few changes had been made for ... decades? The shag rug in the living room, an orange-brown colour, was perhaps the most prominent fossil from a bygone era.

The same was true of the kitchen he led her into. The colour scheme was an olive green and dull blue, with the most unusual feature being a large, white porcelain sink. He gestured towards the table, a large, solid wood affair with scratches in the surface.

"Here, have a seat," he said, and then asked if he could get her anything. The last cup of tea she'd consumed had been in the morning, approximately, oh, sixteen hours ago. That was a most unusual occurrence for her! She'd wanted to make one for herself before heading to The Bear Paw - Chris had been speaking to her purely in monosyllables after finding out that she was planning to see Tom, so she'd been reluctant to ask him - but she had run out of time.

"Tea would be nice," she replied, smilingly. Tom informed her that his mother had been born in England and that he'd used to make tea for her. Samina had no idea how the Brits made their tea, but if their Canadian descendants were any indication - she'd had tea at plenty of her friends' houses - then in all the time the Brits had colonized India, conquering and subjugating the nation and putting their stamp, not to mention their foot, on it, the art of making a good cup of tea had eluded them! Granted, a few hundred years was negligible compared to geological timescales of millions and billions of years, but one was only talking about making a good cup of tea here, not about fashioning entirely new species! Rather than voice her concern, which bordered on mild distress, she simply smiled politely and nodded. That was something Indians hadn't needed the help of Brits to acquire, excessive politeness! In fact, had the Brits managed to help Indians shed it, they would have made a radical, not to mention invaluable, contribution to Indian society!

When Tom placed the tea in front of her, it looked pale and watery; he'd pulled the bag out before she'd managed to make it any further than, "Oh, umm, ..." in her efforts to stop him. As she took her first sip, he asked her how the tea was. True to its appearance, it tasted insipid. "Fine," she replied, her expression a cross between a smile and a grimace.

When he settled down with his own cup, he asked her what made her decide to become a geologist. She said that had it not been for her father, it was unlikely that she'd be one. Unlike other South Asian parents, who encouraged their children to pursue practical careers like medicine, engineering, law, accounting, etc., his advice to her had been to take a variety of courses in university until she found a subject that she was passionately interested in. In first year, she'd taken a combined geography-geology-forestry course and had found the geology component fascinating, even really simple stuff like identifying minerals. Part of the appeal was probably that geology was concerned with the natural world, but there were a ton of other subjects like that. Why she found geology interesting and not them, she really couldn't say, she informed him with a shrug. She just did!

He smiled and remarked, "You know, your answer sounds like someone trying to explain why they fell in love with a particular person."

"Does it?" she asked, puzzled.

"Yeah. They might give a bunch of reasons, but those reasons probably still wouldn't explain why that one person, and not someone else."

"Oh," she murmured.