When life hands you sugarcane, don't make juice out of it?

Father said it had been raining on and off.

"But, it doesn't usually rain as we get close to Pongal, right?" I asked him.

"You are correct.  But this is not the big time rain."

"So, when is Pongal?"

"On the 14th."

As a kid growing up in an industrial town, I had no idea what the Pongal celebrations were really about.  But, I didn't care because I loved to eat sakkarapongal.  Served warm, and with mother adding more ghee to my portion. 

Father handed the phone to mother.  I shared with her an incident from our childhood.  

My brother and I got tired of chewing on the sugarcane, which is also integral to the Pongal celebration.  So, we decided that we would make juice out of it. 

The idiots that we were, we thought we could cut up the cane into pieces and throw them into the blender--the "mixie."  Which is what we did.

Mother stood there watching us, smiling all the way.  It wasn't after the event that we understood why she was smiling.

We threw the chopped up cane pieces into the blender.  With great excitement we turned the machine on.

Not the kind of juice that we thought it would yield.

That's when we understood why she had been smiling throughout--she preferred to teach us a lesson by not teaching us the lesson.  We learnt the difference between a mixie and the juicer that the roadside sugarcane juice guy used.

Mother laughed after she listened to me recall the old days.

Meanwhile, her nurse had arrived.  It was time for her bath.  We said bye.

I continued to think about the Pongal of my childhood days.  

Like every kid, I too looked forward to the cricket test match in Madras during Pongal time.  It was Ananda Vikatan, or maybe Kalki, that had an extensive feature on the visiting England team.  I remember finding it hysterically funny that a player's name was "Old."  "How could somebody have a name "old"" was all I could think of then. 

Thanks to the web, I could immediately verify the year of that test match: Pongal of 1973!

India and England fielded names that I would remember forever.

India won that test match.  I loved it.  It was a special Pongal.