Matchmaker, matchmaker!
July 16, 2008 at 12:02 pm 4 comments
![]() |
A friend of mine invited me to his wedding last Saturday. A blessed event I would have liked to be a part of if I didn’t have a “Study of Ethiopian Language” exam that starts at the exact p.m. his wedding ceremony would be launched. Not because I like weddings, even my own was something to be put up with, but I was burning with a curiosity I hope to have satisfied after staring long and hard into the bride-to-be’s eyes.
This friend of mine, a jounalist by profession and not a day over his 33rd birthday, was marrying a girl we both knew. I knew her before him. Knew her distantly as that girl whose passport resembles “Sene GoleGolta” due to American Embassy’s rejection stamps forbidding her to go join her fiancée she’s confessed to loving more than once. Not more than a year and a half ago, too! So the announcement came as a surprise, if not a shock. But not as much of a shock treament as the male part of the contracting party administered to the sister this morning.
After the usual “lemeDachuh woy?”, “eQa beSelam temelese?”, “beTu moQe?”, I asked how he managed to maneuver the girl to his camp in so short a while. Kindly note that I didn’t ask my friend when it hit him that she was the missing half of his soul he got split with on birth. Men can have many a twin souls, I’ve learned, sometimes overlapping-ly so. In answer to which he laughed and said “remember how you used to push me to her?”.
“Wot?!” was the question that came to mind. A question i, ofcourse, kept to myself. The man is hot out of his honeymoon bed, ferChrisake. You laugh, you joke, you agree. You don’t go about resenting accusations and counting witnesses. That doesn’t mean his comment didn’t shock the abesheet soul to the core. I remember having said she was pretty and decent. That she speaks good English and that I enjoyed our little chat every time we came across each other infront of OCR building at AAU. What stands out, however, is his lack of enthusiasm over her beauty (“not my type”, i believe, was the words he used), his total disinterest to keep talking about her while I sadly observed how she’s likely to dissolve and disappear infront of our very eyes if the Embassy didn’t give her her visa soon.
Ofcourse I should have known better than to say anything to my male friends about girls. For I’ve learned, long ago, that you can never trust a man to handle an information like this maturely. It seems to me, until some woman (a mother, a sister, a girlfriend/fiancée/wife) came to the rescue, men are like those little children Paul talked about in Ephesians. Who get “tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine. It doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s a suit to wear for work, a commitment to make one’s mind over, a house to rent & a furniture to stock it with. Without “an iron hand beneath a silken glove”, men won’t know their hand from their feet. They’d rather sit in the dark, than turn the light on; gloomily look out the window shaking their heads despondently if the kids of the house forgot to bring the “ejj wuha”; or stand outside in the biting cold until the Misses come.
You always hear of a man deciding to date, go steady with, sometimes marry a girl he doesn’t have the butterfly-in-the-stomach for just because his cousins or colleagues said she would be a catch to some lucky fellow. You may have even heard of that guy who dumped the girl he’s fondly remembered as singing “woy fiQir” to in the streets only to replace her with a girl two of his guy friends aren’t on speaking terms over. Yet you never seem to hear a man wanting to commit to a girl his mother didn’t like, or vowing to go to the gallows for her sake as women always do for the men that caugt their fancy.
I don’t know if this inability to grow up on men’s side can be explained away with the power of nurturing in their cradle days or if Freud has anything sick and twisted to say about it. But I hope I haven’t made a mistake when inadvertently fixing my friend and his new wife up.
I kindda like them both 😦 .
Entry filed under: Latest Posts.
1.
abyssinia | July 16, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Been there, done that…sort of! Malete, I remember falling madly in love with this guy I hated with passion. We were neighbors [there house were across ours] and his younger sister was my best friend. They were a big family of 8 kids. I was kool with everybody but this particular kid. I didn’t like the way he looked at me, the way he walked, the way he talked, etc…for some reason kokebachin algetemem.
Don’t ask me how but one day woke up in love with J. BesemeAb! The most embarrassing thing, was how to tell my friends coz they knew my tilacha. Especially his sister who I constantly told that her brother was weird and such an a**. Now what? Tell her or not tell her? Well, kept it as secrete…at least that’s what I thought but I guess it was obvious libe endetefalet.
We dated for a short time and I left the country. A few months later I got a letter from my best friend, inside were some recent pictures and two of them were J’s.
I was like…oh my God, she knew!
2.
abesheet | July 17, 2008 at 6:22 am
Haven’t we all, Abbiye?
There was a guy too, in my neighbourhood. He, his brother and an elder sister came to live in the same giBi as me after their parents divorced and their dad married someone who wasn’t interested to take care of grown up kids. This was a distant uncle or something they were living with, a nasty man with a nastier wife and a spoilt kid. I still can’t understand how that happened. You don’t see a relative taking grown up kids (16-24) over these days.
Anywho, we used to go to the same school (he was 11th grade, and I 9) and used to swap books through a friend of mine whose brother played football with him every Sunday. I thought he was pretty cool, but my friend always made fun of his head (which, i guess, looked bigger than most guys his age; although he was really very cute). So, I played along. “Maan yiGemetaal” 😉 . Not that i had any intention of getting involved with a guy, let alone a guy who lives next door, with the reputation my dad had. Until one day I saw him being insulted and humiliated by “Gash Mamo” while getting water to drink (their house was next to the Buwanbwa). If i wasn’t there, he’d have perhaps pretended the man wasn’t there screaming his head off at him. His older bro was the one always getting in to trouble, a man in a boy’s body we referred to as “Qechine”. So his part was more of a “GelaGay”. But that day, he was taking it as no one ever has, with the sister at a ring-side seat. I remember how near to tears he was when he left, bangging the “GiBi berr” behind him.
I don’t know how it happened but instead of despising him, as he may have felt i would, i totally fall for him! I couldn’t sleep that night. Could neither eat, read, nor think properly. I started shaking like a leaf whenever we pass by eachother in the street (he used to “anGet ZiQ mareG” for the sister even if i don’t usually respond). Every time he sent me a book (he usually “meLebeds” mine, and writes the title on them with beautiful “Qitiltil” tsihfet) i go through every page looking for signs. For two years I loved him, feverishly, not knowing what i wanted from him or us. Hating him sometimes. Being unable to breath every time i thought of him at others. Especially, after i saw him standing outside Menelik the 2nd’s door one day (about a year after he took ESLCE) hugging a tree and looking at me in a way that told all the story. But i was afraid of both him (he was about 3 years older which i can tell because he took grade 11 twice as “Gobez temariwoch” used to do in those days, which was pretty old for a 14/15 year old girl even if the real threat that he might want to have sex with me or sommink wasn’t a possibility that scared the crap out of me) and my dad!! I was also afraid of what the “sefertegna” would say, been always a “chewa/goBez temari/anbabi” girl “KoreDas” were admonished with to take the examples of 8) . But mostly it was pure peer-pressure! My friend made fun of him, you won’t wanna know who she end up with in the end (too politically incorrect for this blog), and if i told her i liked him, i thought she might think less of me. It wasn’t until i was a first year college student, long after he’s left the “Sefer” (his sister got a job and rented a house) and only comes to visit his friends, that my friend told me he has “meYaz” a sister of another friend of her brothers’. “Can you believe it?” she said casually, “‘ya Ginb erass’ wanted to date you? I didn’t tell you because i was afraid you’d be mad. But he once sent Yared saying he was in love with you, and Yared said “enesu yetewaweQalu menchegeresh” but “ene lik likun negerkuta!!”.
I don’t know if that is our “kokeb alemegetatem”, or if it wasn’t meant to be. But I used to feel such a rage at my friend every time i thought of him and ofcourse hated her guts 🙂 . Not that she’d have felt guilty if she knew. If there was anybody who loved hearing their own voice more than that girl, it would have to be the undersigned 😉 .
3.
sistu | July 21, 2008 at 8:28 am
PE PE PE!!!
Great Post (very funny), great chewatan-chewata-yametawal from Abby Abyssinia and another great mels from Abby Abesheet. Only one complaint, ere minew Abesheet, since when are we on PC terms on this blog? so lets have it, who did she end up with?? I’m waiting for the answer ‘ha’ biye. btw, i refuse to believe that nothing was sparking in the meTsaf-mebedaderia zemenat before that fateful bambwa day. Is the conventional thinking that meTsaf-mebedader is the great kidime zigijit for ‘meTebabes’/’meTebabes’ wrong then? (sorry for the use of a non-PC word) And Abyssinia, how does that story end? come on ladies, whats with the suspense here? Even you, Abesheet, it wouldn’t kill you to say more on what became of that matter. we will tell Chris to close his ears (please do so, Chris). I am finding the subject very entertaining. Had a couple of sisters who were notorious for tearing up proposal letters [unread] as a wordless gesture of ‘lik-likun menager’ to the proposer. ay yelij neger
4.
abyssinia | July 21, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Sorry sistuye, there is no suspense to my story. I never got the chance to speak with my best friend about it…
When I went back 6 years later, the house where my first love lived had become to a private school, Junior and Senior Kindergarten.