Over the past few days, I have been reading The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. I should have checked before I started it because based on the title, I was expecting a book about some Brit female detectives.
Was I ever wrong. It is a very touching novel about the life of a woman in Botswana who opened her own detective agency. The problems she solved as a detective were mostly straightforward, and the approach to solving them was quite systematic.
But the novel describes much about the evolution of society and the economy of Botswana and is fascinating. I'm glad I stumbled across it.
On rare occasions, the heroine engages in some nostalgia:
Mma Ramotswe was a realist, who inhabited the present, but one nostalgic thought she allowed herself, one indulgence, was to imagine her Daddy walking through the door and greeting her again, and smiling at her, and saying: “My Precious! You have done well! I am proud of you!” And she imagined driving him round Gaborone in her tiny white van and showing him the progress that had been made, and she smiled at the pride he would have felt. But she could not allow herself to think like this too often, for it ended in tears, for all that was passed, and for all the love that she had within her.
That really struck a chord with me. I spent a day, back in my early 30s, sitting at my desk, imagining I was talking with my father (who had died with I was 15). I imagined conversations about politics, life, relationships, goals, etc. I hadn't thought about that day until this past summer when I came across some of his letters written to my mother before they were married.
And now this passage brought it all back. I guess old(er) folks like to reminisce.