Everyone had a bit of Irish blood, or at least it seemed that way. San Francisco downtown was full of merriment today, and the non-Irish dressed up all the same, with shamrocks, big buckles and something green.
Standing next to Bank of America’s building in the freezing cold, a young woman pulled down her skimpy shorts and bared her bottom at her boyfriend’s camera. They were not Leprechauns, even though they wore big green broad-brimmed hats. They were just a little drunk, with the bars opened and the bagpipes playing Amazing Grace.
Walking up the hill to home, I saw little white spring flowers quivering in the wind. The grass and trees had been washed by yesterday’s rain. It was not only St. Patrick’s Day. It was Spring Day.
For three weeks the old woman sat in a corner of the dance studio during our adult class with a pen and pad in her hands. She had a serious look on her face but she was not severe looking. I glanced at her only once in a while, when we did stretching exercises on the floor, and wondered if she was aghast at our uncoordinated movements and very out of shape bodies.
She was an innovative teacher and administrator, according to our teacher, who studied under her supervision in China when he was a boy. Retired now, in her late seventies, she walked with a cane.
She took a lot of notes but never shared with us. There was no way to impress her with our stiff shoulders and arthritic knees even if we tried. At the end of class we gathered around her to have our pictures taken. All smiles—her American “grand-students”.
To have a life of adventure is a dream. To make it come true takes guts.
Society’s dictum is tried and true. The “I” is always a problem when it decides to go on an adventure. All kinds of hurt and failed relations are the usual suspect. What price is “freedom”? What price is “adventure”? It is important to remember the “price” often has nothing to do with the person who has stepped out of the circle, but the ones who prefer to stay in the predicament.
Poet and film maker James Broughton’s gravestone reads: Adventure — not Predicament.
Winnie and I get together for major celebrations—birthdays, Christmas, and New Year. It is hard to believe, and maybe it is pure fantasy on my part ( because she doesn’t have the recollection) that we have been friends since kindergarten. In any case we have known each other forever, with the kind of friendship that prevails no matter what happens.
We met at the Turkish Kitchen in Berkeley for lunch. We ordered lachmacun (ground lamb on thin bread crust) and Immam bayildi (stuffed eggplant in olive oil), both came out surprisingly authentic and delicious. For dessert, a sugary baklava. Winnie had a bag of present for me.
“I just realized that our birth year and our age is the same this year. (1956, age 56),” Winnie said.
Numbers! “Then it is probably a very good year for us,” I said.
We walked out to a heavy down pour. The first this year. A good omen.
Sometimes it takes hours to write a sentence. Sometimes it takes no time to finish a poem. Inspiration cannot be controlled. It comes when it comes, and it can happen at the most inconvenient time.
I met Li-Yong Lee at the Squaw Valley Writers Conference in 2001, when he was one of the faculty poets. We found a little time to chat at the baseball field, waiting in line for Galway Kinnell to teach us klutz how to bat. Lee told me he worked in a warehouse during the day, stacking boxes. He wanted a job that did not require thinking. Being available when the muse visits is part of an artist’s life.
A long, long time ago, in a small fishing village not too far away, there lived a newly married couple. The husband rose before dawn each morning and went out to sea in his sampan. He cast his net in the dark green water and waited, squatting at the stern. When it was time he pulled up the net that was heavy with tail-flipping fish. Their slippery silver bodies squiggled under the sun.
The husband sold the fish to the local market. His wife worked at home, growing silk worms, feeding them big green Mulberry leaves. After the silk worms spun themselves into cocoons she boiled them in a large pot of water, then brushed, and pulled the single strand out of each one, winding the silk on a reel. Life was hard, but they were happy and content, especially after their baby was born.
One morning, the husband went out in his boat as all the other fishermen. But by evening, when everyone returned to the village, the husband was missing among them.
“Where’s my husband?” The woman asked all the fishermen. They had not seen him. The woman was frantic. She must look for him. She put the baby on her back in a cloth pack and climbed up a green hill overlooking the harbor. In the twilight oil lamps lit up in the fishing boats. The rising moon and the shower of stars kept the woman company. The first ray of sun found her standing in attention. Atnoonthe heat was unbearable. Her clothes were soaked in sweat. The woman didn’t seem to notice. Time passed, and rain came. Time passed, a typhoon tore through the village, causing flooding and mudslides. Time passed. Howling wind, thunder, lightening, each had taken a turn to visit, to threaten, to damage. The woman stood. The frog buttons on her Mandarin tunic came loose, and a gust of wind carried her tattered clothing into the sea. Her skin and flesh had turned black and tough as leather. Time passed. Pigeons and sea gulls stood on her head and shoulders. Their droppings mixed with pee formed a crust covering mother and child. Time passed. Mud, dirt, pebbles, sand and shells, layers upon layers compressed together, changing their forms into a big piece of rock. Fishermen looking toward the village from their boats would point at her silhouette and tell her story; although these were not the same fishermen from her generation. Those people were long dead and gone.
No one could say the woman and her baby were dead. For all you know their hearts could still be beating under the petrified crust. Who can say her husband won’t appear at the horizon one day, and she and her baby won’t burst through the rock to embrace him? A legend is a story that lives forever.
Hey, kids! Finish this audacious little dictum by Theodor Adorno:
The greatness of works of art lies solely in:
a) their ability to see the world fresh, as if for the first time.
b) their capacity to manifest the world sketched by ideology.
c) their power to let those things be seen with ideology conceals.
d) their fidelity to marxist-leninist thought.
e) their ability to mimic the effects of opium.
f) their invitation to serenely survey the improbable majesty of existence.
g) __________________________.
I went for the Wikipedia on Theodor Adorno and found more. The following quote was particularly thrilling:
“Adorno’s idea of society as a self-regulating system, from which one must escape (but from which nobody can escape). For him it was existent, but inhuman.”
Somehow it reminded me of George Orwell’s 1984. Adorno was not talking about some imagined society but our very own, and those who try to escape are the ones who yearn for humanity.
Managing people has got to be one of the most difficult jobs in the world. To impose a standard, to set up an expectation, to make, to control, to guide another brain into doing what you what it to do takes ingenuity. Each person has a different set of aesthetics and definition of what work is. Add emotional drama/trauma and sometimes I wished I had ten arms four brains and six pairs of legs and do everything that needs to be done by myself.
At a party, the hosts put up signs for garbage, recyclables and composts. The guests upon reading the signs showed no clue of understanding how to dispose the various items. I was asked to be the policeman. Bending over the cans I separated the soiled paper plates, food scraps, empty bottles, plastic utensils, etc. and stopped the guests from randomly throwing things into the wrong receptacle. A small task, really; nothing like managing two hundred people in a corporate office. But that’s all the managing I’m happy to do.
Some years ago I was invited to judge a poetry competition. The package of poems arrived in the mail. There must have been close to a hundred poems. The thought of having to read all of them was daunting. But as I sat down to go through the stack I realized it wasn’t quite as difficult a task as I had imagined. Inferior poems were easy to spot. I put them in one pile. The ones that spiked my interest I put them in another. The rest of the poems required more consideration, and each eventually ended up in the “in” or “out” pile.
It took considerable time, but when it came down to deciding the winner and honorable mentions I felt that every contestant was given a fair chance.
The competition I was involved in was probably a small potato compared to other institutions that sponsor book-length contests. I realize from reading their fine prints that most employ a team of “readers” to take care of the elimination process. The invited judges are asked to decide on only the semi-finalists. They don’t get to see the whole scope of the entries.
It is presumptuous to assume that the “readers” have the same sensibility as the judges. Perhaps that’s one way that good manuscripts get lost in the junk pile.
Bari gave me a birthday card. I opened it. The inside was blank.
“You didn’t sign it,” I said.
He didn’t know he was supposed to sign a card. In Morocco they don’t celebrate birthdays. There is no such custom of gift-giving, let alone card-giving.
“I’m learning,” he said.
He knew a guy who just arrived from Morocco and went into a restaurant to work. Within two weeks he was kicked out.
“He doesn’t understand how people think here. I tell him not to be discouraged.” Bari told me. He has his share of suffering: discrimination, miscommunications, rejections, etc. Recently he bought a car, working as a pizza delivery person.
“It’s better. I feel freer working by myself.”
We had dinner at a Moroccan restaurant. When we spoke Arabic to the server he replied in English. There was no interest in making a deeper connection. He was almost a one-man show, taking orders clearing tables running the cash register.
The food was not impressive. We both knew what it should taste like.
Everyone had a bit of Irish blood, or at least it seemed that way. San Francisco downtown was full of merriment today, and the non-Irish dressed up all the same, with shamrocks, big buckles and something green.
