She is short and overweight, beset with arthritis. She hobbles a little, finding it difficult to get her limbs up and down steps, in and out of cars. Still somehow, her legs will come alive at family parties on the dance floor, and, like my own mother, she’ll always be among the last to call it a night.

I let Rina know our laundry has finished churning in her mother’s machine.

There is time after dinner for a game of “Godzilla,” where I growl and snarl on the couch as the kids jump on me and attempt to smother me with pillows, and I grab them, tickle them, and then allow them to be saved by one of the diverting attacks of the other.

A popular variant of this sport is “The Blob”—essentially Godzilla with a blanket over him.