Every week, my father meets with a group of about eight Trinidadian friends on Zoom, to connect and, as we Trinis say, “ol’ talk.” Somehow, despite the fact that they’ve been meeting like this for over a decade, I knew nothing of this gathering until recently.
“Karen, you’ve never seen anything like it,” my mom told me. “Sometimes I go hide in a corner and pretend I’m reading a book, but mostly I’m just eavesdropping on their conversation. They are constantly teasing each other and arguing and laughing and talking over each other.” She shook her head. “For hours, the whole lot of them just get louder and louder, and all I can do is sit there and laugh.”
“How do you know these people?” I asked my dad.
“Oh, some of them are friends from high school,” he said. “And some of them are folks I met during my career.” My dad had worked as a petroleum engineer. Given the importance of the energy industry to the Trinidadian economy, he became well known in the country as a result.
“Is everyone in the group in oil and gas?” I asked.
“No. One is a psychiatrist. One is a doctor, and one is a dentist. There’s an economist. All had very successful careers but are now all retired and have been for decades. We used to meet in person at a clubhouse called the Cosmos Club in Port-of-Spain at about 4:30 in the afternoon every Friday. We’d sit at the bar, and one person would bring some street food in. I would join them every time I was back home in Trinidad, about four times a year. But then, when COVID hit and Trinidad went into lockdown, the club closed. So we began meeting on Zoom.”
“What do you guys talk about?”
“Well, it’s just a lime!” Lime is a Trinidadian word we use to mean a “gathering,” but with a special emphasis on connecting with each other. “And you know what happens in a lime,” my dad continued. “Usually there’s food and drinks, and ol’ talk. And ol’ talk in Trinidad is always about a subject or two or three, often going on concurrently.”
