I get the call running out the door of my apartment Thursday, and it's not really a shock because the warning call came a couple nights prior, and she'd been in the hospital back in August, and it had been up and down since then (mostly down) but still I stop and think for a second about black cherry Jello and then I'm out the door. Work is busy and has been since sometime in 2003 (and before that 2001), and I'm moving a few meetings around, Friday no longer a convenient time for me, and sending out an email to the out-of-office repeater where it slides in between a couple announcements of coworkers taking Monday off for the lunar new year and gets sent around. This will prove uncomfortable later when I am asked by polite and mildly-interested cocked heads with raised eyebrows (maybe they are hoping to vicariously escape the uniform gray weather, maybe latching on to anything from which to start a conversation) where I am headed Friday and I deliver the unsettling answer and become the adopted son of Debbie Downer and Johnny Morbid for a day (and sill later the situation will repeat itself in a bar when I am asked why I must leave so early).
The company has chosen this day for a happy hour and given the circumstances I'm just fine with that. At 5:11, 5:29, and 5:46 I open a Corona and drink it while talking with people who during normal working hours have their bodies united by cubicles and minds divided by org charts but for this one hour the both are mingling with the others and talking - oh where are you headed Friday? - and enjoying the guacamole. This time passes quickly.
The alumni of the company, before it was this company, have chosen this night for a reunion and given the circumstances I'm fairly depressed by that. At 6:33 I walk into a bar and shake hands and procure another beer which I drink while continuing to shake hands and hug (I will be from this point onward shaking many hands and giving many hugs over the next couple days but the thought only occurs later) and talk to people I miss dearly but whose company, by which I mean companionship, will now be relegated to the sporadic lunch or e-mail or alumni happy hour. I glance at my phone and it's 7:20 already and - oh, why must you leave so early? - I run out the door to the point on the roller coaster where the slope is zero and turning negative and even being at the maximum height of the curve where I should have a view of everything the precipitous drop is now the only thing in sight and I am unprepared, even though I knew it was there this morning when the coaster car started moving, and a couple nights prior when I got on, and in August when I started standing in line and years ago when I realized a few things about relative life expectancies and bought the ticket. The cab ride home passes slowly.
It's 7:49 and I scramble to pack a bag and grab the tie that so far I've only used for one purpose and I'm on a PATH train and suddenly in Newark, where my parents pick me up in a rented car and proceed, via the airport to retrieve my brother, to the usual hotel where we enter a room and I realize it's the same one from 18 months ago.
My mother tells me again how it was only just after her grandmother died that she conceived me and perhaps there is some connection to events in life. Perhaps my grandmother, her mother, didn't want to force the cancelation of my upcoming trip to China - a trip I have only even mentioned to my mother in the past week - she suggests. As badly as I want to ask her if she is serious (and if she is really equating my birth to a 7-day package deal to Beijing), she is hurting far more than I, and I nod slowly. The slow nod becomes a habit for about 48 hours.
I do think about China though, only because of the elderly man I met flying from there a few weeks ago. He gave me one name, the flight attendant called him by another, and when he showed me one of his passports (to prove that it didn't have an expiration date) I noticed a third. He left Mauritius at 18, spent some time in London, and found himself sharing a one-room flat in Hong Kong with six other men only a few years later. Licenses for self-run businesses were cheap at the time, so he started his own (hotel supplies, he said) and 40 years later was retired and sitting next to me on the way to his condo in the Philippines, going on and on about the boat he's having built up the Pearl River in Guangdong. Interspersed between his stories were repeated exhortations to grab life by the horns, carpe diem, jump in the deep end to learn how to swim, and so forth. He seemed happy, if a little exhilarated by his own accomplishments. Good for him.
My grandmother didn't have the luxury of packing up and grabbing life's horns in Hong Kong, or across the country, or even jumping in the comparatively deep end of another U.S. state. She came of age in the depression, inherited four step children, gave birth to three more, and was widowed before turning 45. Despite being a single mother to seven she still found room to take in nephews while their mother was on a bender. Years later she would progressively outlive each one of her five siblings, and a daugter, as their bodies were ravaged by cancer or hollowed out by senility. She was tethered: to family, and by extension geography and, until the mouths became self-feeding, career. Choice and indulgence had exited her life early on, not to return until the fancy to exercise them had long faded.
I never heard my grandmother come within a nautical mile of complaining and I suspect only the god she fervently believed in ever might have. I've only in the past few years begun to understand just how the kindly grandmother who would pit black cherries and dump them into Jello, who would wake up early to cook French toast or stay up late to teach me gin rummy, didn't have the kindest of pasts, even spread out over 90 years.
And I think, as I lay down, and as I put my suit on 7 hours later, and as I stare at her in the casket at the viewings, and as I sit, and stand, and kneel at the church the day after that, and as I see her plot on the hillside beneath my aunt, I think, some people may need a boat to go and seize the day but for others, it was one hell of a feat not to let the day seize them.
Two nights ago my prim and religious Japanese instructor presented the class with a new set of characters to learn, one of them indicating the state of being liked (in Japanese, there's no direct equivalent of the verb "to like", so you wind up saying something along the lines of "[as for myself,] there exists a fondness for reaggaeton"), a character which resembles the symbols for woman and child squeezed together. It is, she noted, a convenient mnemonic device for an all-male class (of 2, that night) to remember: female + child = desired. She then giggled, a tad embarrassed.
A pause followed during which my classmate and I silently debated exactly what she meant by that and whether she was aware that she could be perpetuating the stereotype of the Japanese male psyche being sexually obsessed with squealing young schoolgirls dressed in sailor suits. We then nodded slowly and the lesson continued.
Later, when discussing the personality of a hypothetical character, she mentioned that a colloquial term for someone thoughtful and considerate was "easy". After informing her that "easy" had a quite a different idiomatic American English meaning, the case of Whose Language is More Fixated on Lust, a case I thought settled mere minutes beforehand, became muddled once again.
Pinpointing the mass emergence of a trend is easy, but carbon-dating its inception isn't. Music historians may one day point to Paul Wall's album release special on MTV or the mainstream buzz around Mike Jones' "Still Tippin'" as the moment when the "chopped and screwed" sound and/or Shwishahouse officially became the hip hop skool du jour, but the phenomenon has been years, if not over a decade, in the making - the trail has just been a little patchy in the media's neck of the woods. Some were there blazing it though: searching for Chinese visa requirements I stumbled across NYU journalism professor Mitchell Stephens' proto-blog account of an around-the-world trip starting with a drive from New York to South America, taking him through Houston in 2000.
December 26. The wild goose we're chasing through a Houston neighborhood, so poor many of the stores have handwritten signs, is Screwed Up Records and Tapes. The older of the two people now in this 1989 Camry believes a certain slowed-down, hip-hop sound cooked up (under the influence of cough syrup, forgod'ssake) by the late owner of this shop -- DJ Screw -- could be an example of a new culture a-spawning.
Speaking of both hip hop and China, do you think Public Enemy had to re-title their album "It takes a nation of billions to hold us back" for Sino success?
I have returned from a delightful trip to Hong Kong and the Philippines to attend Colleen and Matt's wedding. I took over 600 photographs, which even for me is a silly amount, so I could only condense it to 129 for exhibition. My apologies for not reducing it further.
I've captioned photos where appropriate instead of jotting down a hodgepodge of thoughts in this entry proper. Like this:
My best jet-lag-induced thought was to create a soy-based alternative for persons with nut allergies called "Pecants".
