Stories for Commuting

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[commutingstories]

Tracts

I complete books much faster these days. I make the time during lunch, make it in the few minutes that I stay in my office after work, in the time between after getting home and dinner, the minutes before going to bed. It surprises me how the weight and thickness of the left side suddenly overwhelms what I hold in the right. And I wonder, did I really read all of that.

I was talking to Vivian a few days ago. My parents had gone out on a date for this year's Qingming Festival. It was raining and my mom called and asked if I could push the lawnmower back into the shed. They had left it out and were worried about the engine in that weather. So I did. And it made me think:

They bought this lawnmower in 1996, when we moved to Sacramento from San Jose. I remember that day because we all went to Sears together. We bought not only the lawnmower but also the washer and dryer. Anyway, that's nineteen years ago.

So I was telling Vivian, it's amazing to think that this mower has lasted that long. More than that, it's amazing to think how many miles my family must have walked that thing--myself, my parents, my brothers--only within the square footage of the two minuscule sections of our front lawn, plus backyard. Like drawing a rectangle on a piece of paper and shading it over and over and over, once a week, for nineteen years with a pencil that never wears out. Even more amazing, to "zoom out" and view this from an aerial view, viewing not only our yard but the yards of our entire neighborhood, neighbors and all, doing the same within these tiny tracts of land.

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Ambush

I was ambushed by a kid, couldn't have been more than fifteen, as I just got out of my car in front of my house, after a long day at work, eight to seven. He asked if I could be the first one to subscribe to this coupon program he was hard selling me, something about subscribing for ten months for $5 a month. It was for a college scholarship and he only needed three people to join. I stood and read the info clipboard he was holding and said I'll look it up online. He pleaded with me that it was for a college scholarship. If he could just get three people to sign up for it, he would be eligible to apply for this scholarship.

I looked at him and thought I could hear that adolescent cry voice. You know what I'm talking about? That sound, that rising feeling, you used to get at the base of your throat, that feeling you used to get when you got into an argument and just realized that, yeah, it kind of hurts and you didn't know why yet. It was that cry voice.

"You actually can't do it online," he said. "Oh?" I said. "I already have one person signed up. I just need two more." (I thought I was the first).

The cry voice broke. And by that, I mean it went back to a normal conversational sale tone. I said I was sorry. I apologized. And he said, "Thank you for your time and walked away."

I was actually feeling kind of bad; like I was a terrible person or something, but writing this, I don't feel too much about it now. I've turned away many homeless and pan-handlers. Why was this different? Must've been the fact that the sun had just set, I was tired, and hungry. So were those kids (there were two of them; I spotted the other down the street). I don't know.

[commutingstories]

A time to begin writing again. 

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Life has been good to me the past few months; or I should say that I've been good to life.

I'm learning how to live  with an eye on what I have around immediate surroundings instead of being haunted by what I could be doing or what is not around me. I'm blessed by the student assistants I have to privilege of mentoring, I'm blessed by the managers who mentor me in return. Everyday, I feel absolutely lucky. 

Some would think that this is a very narrow way to view yourself but I find it to be quite the opposite. It's ultimately the most freeing experience I've had in a long time. Peace as an internalized feeling is something new and something that lets me see myself better. 

Have you ever stopped to look at the leaves falling all around you in early December? Last week, I was leaving my aunt's home in downtown Sacramento, which was under a heavy windstorm and rain. I was waiting at the stop sign at the corner of 11th and V, in front of the elementary school when the leaves began descending and cascading across the top of my car. It didn't sound much different than that of raindrops. It seems autumn comes later and later each year. 

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It was a nice moment we've all had here but I'm sad it's come to an end. I will message those in the know about where we can meet again. 

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 "And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure... And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, "Yes, the stars always makes me laugh!" And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you..."

And he laughed again.

It will be as if, in place of the stars, I have given you a great number of little bells that knew how to laugh..." Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

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Inner strength is hard-earned. You deserve thanks for that.

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Boyhood, dir. Richard Linklater.

Sometimes you witness things that make you want to be a better person, a better (potential) father, a better friend, teacher, mentor, brother, lover, son, individual. I still need some time to think about Boyhood, but it's easy to say that it's one of the best film's I've ever seen. Calling it a film feels problematic actually because it's so expansive. It's more of an experience. I imagine that I'm going to be haunted by it for a very long time after having seen it. One thing that I know for sure, when Vi and I walked out into the parking lot, the first thing that I did was hug her. It felt so natural to do so and even life affirming. Whatever embers were left after the credits rolled, I didn't want to lose them.

[commutingstories]

On a good day, when the sky is blue and there are no cars on the road, it takes fifteen minutes to get to Vi’s house. I drive down Laguna Boulevard, past the overpass where it changes into Bond, and past the high school where I turn left on Bradshaw on the outer flanks of the suburb. When you get out far enough, the boundaries of the new developments and decaying farmlands jut up against one another like shifting plates. The miles of tract housing reach out and imposes itself over the decaying and slowly abandoned farms and ranches. This process takes the form of cows and horses creeping towards the wire fence to observe, I assume, the Honda and Nissans gathered at the stop sign intersection. Where are you going? Why the hurry? The bulging eyes and slack jaws ask me over the iron barbs. To Vi's house I say. 

I drive north, past Sheldon, and turn right onto Calvine. Vi’s house is off of Vineyard Road. Maybe some time ago, there were actual vineyards there.

On Google Maps, the route makes a seamless and angular S shape from my house. Here are the exact numbers: Vi’s house is 8.8 miles from my home. Taking the bus, the distance is still 8.8 miles although the route is not as smooth. As charted, the path resembles more of a bedroom key and to follow it to the end, the required time would be anywhere from 1:39 to 2:19 hours depending on the time of day. The bus does not run a constant schedule in this part of town.

Walking, the way is smoother. After all, you are not beholden by the rules of the bus schedule, just your own pace and level of fitness. In the summer, you are only beholden to your tolerance of the valley’s dry summer heat, and in the winter, the valley’s biting cold. But the path looks nice. Like a person climbing a small mountain. Or the incline blip if you are on the exercise bike. Thinking about it now, I’ve never ridden my bike to Vi’s place before. It’s something to consider. I think about her singing She & Him, "Alone ... on a bicycle for two." 

Still, I like the drive. I put my window down, feel the breeze blow into this grey bread loath of a car and watch the suburbs sweep itself out from underneath the road in front of me. I watch the landscape transition from Spanish missionary beige into dusty yellow. Like watching the strands of a straw broom stretching itself out on the cold tiles of our kitchen floor. Vi calls it Steinbeck yellow. Vi is full of sayings and jokes. Sometimes, I can feel the puns forming in the air between us and all we have to do is look at each other after the opening semantic links have been established. We both mind a lot. 

The distance from my home to Hong Kong is thousands of miles. Three thousand? Four thousand? Three thousand five hundred? I have already forgotten. All that I can remember now is that it was an unfathomable distance and yet somehow, I was able to make that work for a time, condensing those months and hours into nothing but a small trip into the country side instead out of the country. Unfathomable. Phantoms.

When I input Hong Kong into Google Maps, there is no route. No bus timeline, no walking path, no driving directions. The points of transit stop and end where they begin.

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A letter from Willa Cather to her younger brother, written July 8, 1916:

My Dear Douglass…

I shall always be sorry that I went home last summer, because I seemed to get in wrong at every turn. It seems not to be anything that I do, in particular, but my personality in general, what I am and think and like and dislike, that you all find exasperating after a little while. I’m not so well pleased with myself, my dear boy, as you sometimes seem to think. Only in my business one has to advertise a little or drop out—I surely do not advertise or talk about myself as much as most people who write for a living—or one has to drop out. I can’t see how it would help any of my family any if I lay down on my oars and quit that rough-and-tumble game. It would be easy enough to do that. I’ve had a very hard winter and have got no work done except two short stories — one very poor. Judge McClung’s death and Isabelle’s marriage have made a tremendous difference in my life. The loss of a home like that leaves one pretty lonely and miserable. I can fight it out, but I’ve not as much heart for anything as I had a year ago. I suppose the test of one’s decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please. I suppose it’s playing the game after that, that counts.

However, the truth is usually gloomy, and one doesn’t have to talk about it all the time, thank goodness… I know I’m “trying”. Most women who have been able to make over a hundred dollars a month in office work, have been spoiled by it in one way or another. It is bad for all of them and it was bad for me… I won’t sit around and weep. I can’t be hurt again as badly as I was last summer. After this I’ll be more philosophical; I won’t expect too much, and I mean to enjoy any goodwill or friendship I get from any of my family. I enjoy every single member of my family when they are half-way friendly toward me. I enjoy them a great deal more now than I did in my younger days when I kept trying to make everybody over. My first impulse, of course, is to think that my own way of seeing things is the right way. But my second thought is always to admit that this is wrong and that I have been often mistaken. I even think I’ve grown a good deal milder in the last year — I’ve had trouble enough and losses enough. Three friends died during the winter whom it seemed to me I could not get on without. And perhaps the disapproval I got at home last summer has been good for me. I am quite a meek proposition now, I can tell you. I think I’ve had my belting, and it has taken the fizz out of me all right — and I’ll tell you this, it’s positively shipwreck for work. I doubt whether I’ll ever write anything worth while again. To write well you have to be all wrapped up in your game and think it awfully worth while. I only hope I’m not so spiritless I won’t be able to make a living. I had two stories turned down this winter because they had no “pep” in them. The editors said they hadn’t and I knew they hadn’t…

Time is good for violent people.

Yours with much love

Willie

[commutingstories]

Writing Letters

I received a set of Adrian Tomine postcards from Kenneth today in the mail. Though I'm a great fan of Tomine, it was Kenneth's words that were more valued and appreciated. Sometimes people write letters about you, so that you're reading about yourself from somebody else's eyes. Other times, they write you letters about themselves, their daily lives, making you not the center of focus, but the center of their empathy and trust. These letters are also about you. I prefer these latter letters. Kenneth's a great friend, a friend I don't deserve, but still a friend. I knew it was over between D and I on the morning she told me to stop writing her after five years of having written her. Writing about her, writing for her, writing to her, writing in place of her. She read all of it until she told me that she didn't want to read it anymore (she said she didn't have time, but what people mean by time is actually desire). And that was the day that I knew it was over. Vivian's right, words have weight. And I'm sure Kenneth would say the same. That's what I appreciate about letter writers and why it was over when D told me to stop writing about her, for her, to her, and in place of her. But that's okay. I received a set of postcards today in the mail. Though I'm a great fan of postcards, it was the words that were more valued and appreciated. Sometimes people write letters about you, other times, they write letters about themselves ...

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I spent all night looking for this photo. It's one of the most amazing denim jackets I've ever seen and my mom wore it without even being conscious of how niiiiiice it was. She wore it to the Ranch 99. She wore it to the TK Noodle. She even wore it to the hospital on the day that one of my brothers nearly bled himself to because of two-week long ulcer. She wore it on the morning that her and my dad drove out to Marin County to pick me up after I totaled my car and myself in the process. This denim jacket, I will remember forever. Look at that thing.  Growing up, I never paid attention to my parent's sartorial choices except to feel embarrassed about them. It's FOB fashion at its finest right? Thinking about how they've aged at the same time that I've been aging (on a relative scale, but in a lot of ways, in the same way), these denim jackets, these Pooh corduroy shirts, and completely fit-for-the-occasion urban safari outfits, somehow gain new meaning.  Besides being ahead of their time, which they always are, what I used to feel embarrassed about (I grew up in a predominantly white upper middle-class suburb, until white-flight happened, with its own sartorial codes that dictated your rank and position in the community, which is brought to bare in the looks that other parents and classmates give you when said parents roll up to the sidewalk to pick your ass up from school) is actually a testament to their willful ignorance (and not only being aware of their willfulness but also standing on it) of the various wants and desires that make wrinkled women drop tens of thousands on a Botox plan with a clutch on the side, make grown men cry because the stitching's not right on the passenger seat of their Bimmer, and of their kids (who my brothers and I wished to be in their family, for a time). Because they had to be willful.  Because they had to. And they did it. And that's what they prided themselves on. There's a beauty in work and making do against the odds. There's a beauty in the want to work. And I don't mean the "beauty" that's reserved for talking about the human conditions of the slum squalid (because that is the only condition that we should concern ourselves with, or so they say from their position of sentimental economic distance), but an aesthetic beauty. Take this denim jacket for instance, when worn by mom, who is doing dishes. You want to talk about swag. You want to talk about who owns cultural capital.  So when I see gramps in Chinatown with silk on silk on silk. It's because she had to. She willfully layers silk on silk on silk, despite of it all. Don't ask her why she doesn't find it as special you do. What a question to ask: how do you feel lacking appreciation for yourself?  So while I was gone, trying to tell them about finding myself and all this talk about the beauty of the world and its art and cinema, going to see about a girl and all that, they didn't really find that, that special either. But they let me do it anyway because they knew all about what it meant to be willful.

[vintageanchorbooks]

"April Rain Song" by Langston Hughes

“Let the rain kiss you Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops Let the rain sing you a lullaby The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk The rain makes running pools in the gutter The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night And I love the rain.”

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Old Friends.

Received a long but candid and thoughtful email from a friend who disappeared out of the blue long ago. Sometimes, I wonder about the people who've fallen through the cracks of my life, for no reason at all, as I'm pushing up 30. You valued them when they were around during your formative and self-discovery years and when they weren't, things carried on as if you never came across them. But when I saw that name in my inbox, talking about how they couldn't stand Ira Glass, as if the years had not past at all, I felt strangely elated. And when I read about the things that were experienced in the years of that unknown life, I was glad for their disappearing, in a good way. Yet, at the same time, I realized how such an abrupt appearance from an absence like that, can really make you realize how you may have missed someone without knowing it, and how easy it is to ignore their presence when being in their presence.

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“You are not an ugly person all the time; you are not an ugly person ordinarily; you are not an ugly person day to day. From day to day, you are a nice person. From day to day, all the people who are supposed to love you on the whole do. From day to day, as you walk down a busy street in the large and modern and prosperous city in which you work and lie, dismayed and puzzled at how alone you can feel in this crowd, how awful it is to go unnoticed, how awful it is to go unloved, even as you are surrounded by more people than you could possibly get to know in a lifetime that lasted for millennia and then out of the corner of your eye you see someone looking at you and absolute pleasure is written all over the person's face, and then you realize that you are not as revolting a presence as you think you are. And so, ordinarily, you are a nice person, an attractive person, a person capable of drawing to yourself the affection of other people, a person at home in your own skin: a person at home in your own house, with its nice backyard, at home on your street, your church, in community activities, your job, at home with your family, your relatives, your friends - you are a whole person.” 

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

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From This American Life.

Nancy Updike:

Does he bring something to your life? Is there a good part? Is there pleasure?

Ira Glass:

Yeah, of course. It's not as much pleasure as the amount of work it is. All the pleasures are really corny ones. Like it's really sweet to have this animal that trusts no one and is alone in this world except for us. And he trusts us.

And he's a nervous dog. And to get him out of his head, and he's just running after a ball, and he's bringing it back. And you throw it again, over and over, and he's super happy, like a normal dog-- it's really sweet to see. It really feels like a triumph.

And he's sweet, as a dog. I love him. And I love my wife. And it would kill her if we could've kept him alive longer and we didn't do it. And that was true so early on that any other premise was unthinkable.

That's why it's not a question. That's why you can say all this stuff. And I feel like if you picture a little scale with a balance, it's not even weighing anything on that side of it.

Nancy Updike:

Well, because it's not about the dog. The thing on the other side of the scale is Anaheed, not the dog. I think that's what's hard to understand from the outside is that it seems like, ah, it's about this dog. But it's about your relationship with your wife.

Ira Glass:

But the thing is if Anaheed were to just vanish off the face of the earth, I would still take care of the dog. Years ago, she made me promise that if she were to suddenly die, I would keep the dog alive. And at that point, it was kind of like a 50/50 choice, and I said I would as a promise to her. But now it doesn't matter that I promised her. I would just do it.

Nancy Updike:

And what changed?

Ira Glass:

It's a hard thing to spend so much energy trying to protect a helpless creature, or a helpless person, or anything that's helpless. It's a hard thing to turn that off. Once you've been protecting it, your mind is used to protecting it. And the thought that you wouldn't protect it just becomes offensive to who you are. You can't flip off that part of yourself like it's a light switch.

Nancy Updike:

It's interesting that you consider him helpless, though, since he lunges at you every day. And you see helplessness behind I think what other people see as aggression.

Ira Glass:

Now I see that. Right, but fundamentally in this world, he's 1 foot tall. He weighs 60 pounds. He can't earn any money. He doesn't speak the English language.

I'm in charge. You know what I mean? Like I could have him killed any day.