Carmel

Part II: Balderdash

The Acorn's crowning glory, the place everyone could agree was beautiful and worth its wood was the backyard. It grew from a multi-tiered deck that led down into a freshly laid rectangle of grass, where there waited a horseshoe pit and a small platform for spectators or, as we used it, afternoon yoga sessions. Here, we could all stand together and see the ocean without being mauled by strong winds. Here was the grill where Andrew made delectable pork chops. Here was the hammock Caroline lounged in briefly before being summoned to play cartwheel. Here was the small square of sand with the metal rod sticking up where Darwin and Hoyt spent hours trying to toss horseshoes around, punishing the loser with push-ups. And here was the platform upon which Lynn led the girls from pose to pose until we ended up with the sun falling upon our faces in Shavasana, the yogic dead pose, feeling more alive than ever. 

 

On our last evening we dined at the Flying Fish Grill in downtown Carmel, a gem that slopes gently down to the beach, where a giant twisted tree stands with one sharp, dead branch jutting into the grey sky. Like stone, its trunk was smoothed from sandy winds. For dessert we bought a carton of Mocha Almond Fudge (an ubiquitous albeit elusive flavor – cartons never taste as good as scoops from a sweet shop) and two boxes of Magnums – ice cream bars I discovered on another beach, in another country to enjoy at sunset on the Acorn’s deck. And we did, taking in the seascape for one last time. Geese walked about the grass beyond the deck, foraging for their own sweet grub. My cousins played a final game of horseshoes. The sky glowed, than began to fade. The air was crisp, the sea calm, the grass soft but cold, as though prodding us indoors. Our ice cream finished, we went in, single file and slightly muted as people usually are at the end of vacations. Behind us, the sun fell slowly down behind the sea. 

In the living room Andrew announced, “We have time for one last game.”

Caroline and I nodded.

“Balderdash,” we said. They were leaving that night, while the rest of us the following morning.

As our parents talked wistfully in the kitchen – save for uncle Louis who sat down once again in his favorite chair – Caroline explained the rules of “Balderdash: The Hilarious Bluffing Game.”

The cards provide five categories including strange words, movie titles, and acronyms. Define or explain them. Make up what you don’t know and hope people believe it.  

Caroline was right, I was good and won the game by a two-space margin; though the highlight of the game belonged to my cousin Andrew, who for the acronym TEAM, wrote “Turtles of European American Mothers”. I laughed until my lips cracked. Balderdash indeed.

 

And all too soon, it was time for two of our party to break away. As Caroline and Andrew readied to go, Lynn played a little girl’s tune upon the old piano in the Acorn’s game room while her husband stood by, hands crossed over his chest, marveling.

“I didn’t know she could play,” he said, as I walked by.

A few walls away, my mother chatted quietly with Darwin, both thinking that the music wafted from someone’s computer. My uncle Louis stood up from his chair and paced around, dreading his youngest son’s departure. He wrung his hands.

“Too short,” he said, face forlorn, “Too beautiful, too short.” 

We stood on the grass, the only light coming from the Acorn’s windows and Caroline’s car, which glared at us from the pitch-black driveway and cast long shadows of our bodies left behind. Hands in our pockets we thought collectively of the following day, the long drive home, and life with less garden and less sea, more light at night. They waved goodbye. We waved back.

“And now we are eight,” Darwin said softly.

The Acorn became the only source of light.

 

As I wondered how far I dared to walk without a flashlight, Uncle Louis turned to go inside. “Too short,” he said again, “too beautiful, too short.” And though he couldn’t see, I nodded. Balderdash indeed. 

Carmel

Part 1: The Acorn 

In Carmel, I learned how to play Balderdash. 

On Sunday morning we stood at a lookout point on 17-mile drive, a famous stretch of highway that contours the ocean - or does the ocean contour the land? -  and discussed what to do after dinner on our last evening together. 

"Balderdash," said Caroline, squinting over the water’s rolling glint, "I think you'll be good at it."

I nodded in anticipation; who wouldn't love to play a game they'd be good at? 

The night before we had watched a terrible Taiwanese movie about young gangsters - they crossed and double-crossed each other mostly in Taiwanese, which most of us didn't understand. And on Friday, the night we arrived, we played Charades, parents included, girls vs. guys. The girls lost, but it wasn't a terrible loss. Some things take practice. 

And so our weekend passed in a sprawling, ocean side paradise. My cousins rented a rustic house - some family's home, filled with their history, their lore – to celebrate their father's retirement. It was called "The Acorn," though more fittingly it might have been called "The Hive." Single story with four bedrooms and a separate cottage, the Acorn was designed decades ago in a labyrinthine style for a large family with many children and a constant stream of guests. Built of dark, paradoxical wood that seemed both sturdy and slight, the house creaked ceaselessly, yet was quiet. At night it required dozens of lamps to light yet in the mornings, was flooded with pale, seaside sunlight, the kind that hesitates to emerge from behind the clouds, like a shy but beautiful child hiding behind his mother's back.

The house was, as my cousin Andrew noted, like a "little museum," filled with old books with fascinating titles (Principles and Practice of Butter Making by McKay and Larsen, and The Science and Practice of Cheese Making by Van Slyke and Publow – apparently it takes two to write about such subjects). The oldest volume was a Rutgers yearbook from 1928, strangely titled The Scarlet Letter. It left a dusty red mark on my pajamas when I set it in my lap to scan the pages for one Mr. Whisler, the grandfather or perhaps great grandfather of the family who owned the house. But he was nowhere to be found. Yet around me, the Whislers and their friends were everywhere. They hung from the walls in faded photographs and pencil portraits, stern-faced gentlemen with white hair and stiff moustaches, somber-faced children sitting cross-legged before their clapboard schoolhouse, and soft-looking women with high collared dresses and tight braids. They stood atop mantles and bookshelves in trophies of contests past, the most amusing of which was a stout bronzed cow set atop a gleaming onyx column, awarded to T.F. Riley in 1950 for Highest Butter Fat Increase Per Cow: 59.5 lbs. In the front cover of the oldest books were inscribed the names of people - some visitors, some relatives - and, on the underside of a wooden duck, a gift to the Whislers "From George, 1970." 

My uncle Louis, nearing his mid-seventies, lumbered around The Acorn like a happy child with too-big shoes. Though a former aerospace engineer whose daily work involved pages and pages of algorithms, an hour long commute into the heart of Los Angeles and top-secret trips to top-secret destinations (to this day he is still unable to discuss the nature of some of his projects) he was immediately at home in the Acorn. He found a favorite chair in the living room and developed a routine that included consuming a large brunch, followed by a walk along the ocean if the weather permitted and if the wind was not too strong. 

My aunt Joannie wore a red parka and new, old tennis shoes for much of the trip, smiling softly at her children all around her and her husband, for whom retirement was long overdue. It was a special occasion, she said, when I complimented her shoes. The shoes were nearly a decade old, a gift from her youngest son, but she had saved them for such a trip. They contrasted nicely with the house’s dark floors and against the vivid green grass of the garden, through which she traipsed with my mother.

My parents loved the house too, but for different reasons: my mother gathered parsley from the small herb planter next to the kitchen to sprinkle on our eggs and disappeared for what seemed like hours at a time to stroll around the gardens, which were green and lush and smelled of the nearby sea. She sniffed each blossom and gingerly stroked the wisteria hanging from the trellis, trying to remember the English names of other small, pretty faces.

"Rho..." she would say on her way in, wiping her feet on the mat outside, face flushed from the chilly air, "Rhodo..." And I would finish for her, "...dodendron, Mom. Rhododendron."  

Like me, my father found the house a perfect place to read, though not because it was filled with books. He brought his own - a thin but dense Chinese paperback with a severe-looking emperor on the cover - and read in one of two padded wicker chairs with their backs against a large window overlooking the garden. In the mornings, my cousins still sleeping, I would wake and walk into the kitchen to see my father fully dressed with hair combed, breakfast eaten long ago, reading in the chair, George's duck sitting quietly next to his right shoulder. Occasionally my mother's slow figure would appear in the window, her upper body curved towards a bush or tree, and for a brief moment their bodies would align, my mother standing behind my seated father, the only division between them being a large pane of glass, translucent yet impenetrable. 

Compared to the walls and shelves of all the other rooms, the bedrooms were the sparest; closets emptied and dresser tops cleared for strange guests and their strange, anachronistic things: smart phones, laptops, iPads. Faded paintings and old sports equipment hung from the walls, though like a lingering smell or an intangible albeit vivid memory, one could still feel the aura of visitors past. Being one of two single people on the trip, I volunteered to share a small room with my cousin Darwin (together we made a two-spoke third wheel) thinking it would spare him sharing a room with my father, whose snores I often compare to a jackhammer. Even two rooms away however, my father’s snores impinged upon our late night conversations. We wondered how my mother slept at all. Though in the morning Darwin would accuse me of snoring softly, like a “little bear,” at night, tucked into our narrow twin beds, the ceiling slanting close above our heads, we talked about relationships – his, mostly. What makes a relationship work, we wondered, certainly not snoring like a jackhammer. Yet all around us, married couples old and young slept and slept.

Bad People

They say you can tell a lot about a person from the way he treats his subordinates. I was born with an under-bite and my parents, not wanting their daughter to be mistaken for Jay Leno's bastard (can a girl be a bastard?), decided to get me braces when I was in elementary school. I say "get me braces" like it was a gift, and looking back with my straight teeth, it was, but at the time I saw my friends wincing from the pain of newly tightened braces and thought, "I think I'll live with this under-bite." It seemed that the only person in the world who wanted braces was Joanna, the daughter of my parents' friends.

Our parents often dined together on the weekends, leaving me, Joanna and her sister Jennifer at home to entertain ourselves, which Joanna did brilliantly for all three of us. When I showed up one evening with my new decked out smile, she gasped. "Brace are gorgeous!" she gushed and raced about finding wire to put on her own teeth. Joanna, who's favorite television shows (from the age of 10 to 14) were "Xena," "Hercules," and "Power Rangers," had perfect teeth. Instead of giving her an under bite God gave her half a brain.

But before my mouth was to be admired by Joanna, my parents had first to find an orthodontist.

"Your aunt recommended someone," my mom said one afternoon, "Angela and Michelle see him too."

I'm pretty sure that by then, I'd spent a good amount of breath laughing at my cousins, calling them "metal mouth," "train tracks" and, had I been clever enough, "tin grin." But back then I didn't yet know about my unspoken deal with God or Vishnu or whomever is in charge of Karma around here. Basically, what goes around comes around - in my universe anyway - and a few months after my cousins got their braces, the rough hands of a rather burly dentist glued the same metal torture devices were glued onto my teeth.

I forget his name, but let's just call him Cuddles. To his patients he spoke soothingly, his voice smooth and thick, the cadence of which was meant to mask the brisk, jerky movements with which he worked. On my first visit I walked in and heard the unmistakeable spine-tingling whirr of the dental drill and a strange hammering, followed by an even more terrifying pluck - the sound of braces being popped off one by one to reveal straightened, obedient teeth along with, surprise, surprise, the festering decay. That's the dirty secret of braces: you'll have straight teeth, but if you didn't brush correctly during the correction period, well, you've got about five years to enjoy them. Max. Cuddles' waiting room was filled with kids and teens, as though he marketed himself exclusively in cafeteria lunch trays.

"Apparently he's a real hit with the kids," I had heard my mother say to my dad, and now, looking around the waiting room, it appeared to be so. Mothers waited languidly while their children lay on a deceivingly comfortable vinyl and paper wrapped chair, mouths stretched as wide as they would go while Cuddles ducked in and out with his picks and small mirrors. When he emerged, the mothers would leap up to pat their children (lips cracked, mouths slightly bigger) on the head and nod vigorously and concernedly at whatever Cuddles was saying. Always, he spoke with an exaggerated graveness, as though poorly kept teeth and loose braces would lead to long spells in prison. I could tell, even at the young age of nine, that Cuddles was in love with himself. What's more, I could tell that several of the young mothers were in love with him as well. What's not to love about a man who knows how to use tools, keeps unruly children in check and could practically call himself a doctor?

As befitting a man with a short, fast temper, he drove a fast, expensive car, purchased with the deformities and decay of pubescent teeth. He spoke at a pompous volume and walked with a swagger that seem to afflict many men with similar degrees. His surgical mask was never fully on, and instead hung limply from his left ear like a forlorn, discarded handkerchief. Its intended use, I could see, got in the way of his view of himself in the office's many mirrors. However expected of someone with his ego, his habit of self-adoration confused me. Cuddles was ugly. Not only was he short and stocky in a most unattractive way, he had suffered cystic acne as a child and it had left him with small, gaping craters on his face, as though he'd seen a meteor shower and stuck his face into it. 

I'm certain I wasn't the only kid to hate him - after all, the man tortured our teeth every few months or so, having his assistants call us at home every few weeks during a particularly delicious lunch to remind us that we were overdue for a tightening. As soon as we hung up we'd look down at the food, knowing full well that it would be weeks before we could enjoy biting into it again. But you can't fault a man for trying to help you. No, my teeth are straight; he did his job well. I didn't like him because he seemed to hate each of his soft-spoken, doe-eyed assistants. It was as though he lived by two rules: never bite the hands that feed you, these being the hands of his patients' mothers, and chew off those of whom you pay.  

He employed a handful of young, timid Asian girls who had hoped for quiet careers as dental technicians but had unwittingly enlisted to work for Satan in a white coat. They were screamed at and humiliated. No matter what juicy gossip was being divulged in the latest of People Magazine, one could stop cold when Cuddles berated his assistants. He called them "idiots," "dummies," "morons," and other Chinese equivalents. He threatened to fire them in front of his patients and, I heard from my aunt, actually did once, right in the middle of a removal: ("You idiot... pluck...you're....pluck... FIRED!") The brave ones who didn't quit after a week courageously stayed, I like to think, for the patients' sakes. They did their jobs well, for it was their presence more than anything that put me at ease, and held their hands steady even while Cuddles barked behind their ear, his hot breath showering over both of us.

In the end, my teeth were more cooperative than most other kids'. My under-bite became a proper bite in less than half a year. Even Cuddles was surprised by my progress, but he masked this quickly with his usual hubris. "My...pluck....amazing...pluck...technique.... blah...pluck...blah...pluck...blah." I guessed that jaw, tired of Cuddles' constant, violent intrusions and temper tantrums, worked furiously to correct itself. "Anything to get away from that horrible man," it said. I got out with two cavities, a set of gum-pink retainers and directions to wear them everyday when I went to bed.

"If you don't," Cuddles warned, "I'll be seeing you again real soon."

For the first two months I wore those retainers with militant devotion until one afternoon, I'd wrapped them in a napkin to eat lunch and was horrified to find that I'd accidentally thrown them away. Rather than dig through the school's trashcans, I decided to pray. To God, to Vishnu - whoever was in charge of Karma, paid in full. "What goes around has come around," I whispered, "Please, please, please keep my underbite at bay. I don't ever want to see Cuddles again."

And whomever I had appealed to took note and let my teeth retain their position without the retainer. Now, when people compliment my teeth I give credit where credit is due.

"I had a dickhead orthodontist named Cuddles," I say, "But he had some great assistants." Hope they're not there anymore; but if they are, they ought to remind themselves that what goes around come around, however long it may take.

The Weather

I have a bad habit of writing about the weather. It's like talking about the weather, which is dreadfully boring, but sometimes, can't be helped. My first week back from Taiwan was blessed with gorgeous weather. Hot, sunny, blue blue skies. Friends complained that God had skipped Spring but I thought, "Who needs spring? I want to go swimming."And it seemed like I would be able to. Each day, though jet-lagged, I set one foot into the pool and told myself the water was warming up. "Yup, yup," I thought, rubbing my hands and wondering if it was safe to swim with jet-lag (I fell asleep in the bathtub once and awoke in cold water only because I was breathing in water). Anyway, someone up there organizing the weather made a mistake. He put Summer on stage a few months earlier than scheduled, then caught his mistake and took it right back off. Like leaking a new song on the internet. But the damage was done and now I'm like, "Bring that weather back, dammit!"

When I was younger, I hated the heat. Or at least I told myself I hated the heat. I sweat a lot. Too much. It's unladylike, but I've learned that having warm fingers and toes makes me feel infinitely more human than does being a sweat-free, freezing lady, so now I say, "Bring it. Turn that heat on." (All cheesy, like an Usher song). In Taiwan, I spent a few moments each day praying for warm weather, for the sun to crack the sky open and dry up the rain - I don't care about humidity, which does miracles for my complexion, I just want some sun - but mostly it rained, huge plopping drops that drowned out the sound of my prayers. On four days there was sun, I put my shorts on and ran outside, turning my palms up and down so that my fingers would be less purple.

One afternoon I stood at a crosswalk, not really having anywhere to go but just wanting to soak up as much sun as possible. An elderly woman walked by wearing standard Asian woman sunny weather gear: visor, sunglasses, long sleeved shirt, pants, and a sheer umbrella. I wanted to tell her about sunblock, but she probably drank a bottle for breakfast. I didn't have to see her eyes to know that she was looking me up and down, imagining the sunspots forming in my skin, the crows feet deepening at the corner of my squinting eyes. "You aren't doing your skin any favors," she said.

I wanted to teach her the phrase "sun-kissed." But she would have probably just shuddered and said, "Yes, the kiss of death."

Gym, Tan, Laundry. or None of the Above

I wonder what sort of figure I cut, walking down the driveway in my pajamas at 1pm every weekday afternoon to get the mail. In a way, it's quite poetic because the pajamas are ones I bought when I first moved to New York for college.

We live on a street of retirees, though most seem to be busier than I've ever been. They go to the gym, run errands, golf, take long ski and fishing vacations in other states, have friends and family over by the dozens, garden, write letters to my mother on flowery stationery (assuming that she too, is retired) inviting her to join them on various garden tours where brunch is included. They are probably so busy they never really see me getting the mail at 1pm, but if they did, they'd probably think, "My, we watched that girl grow up and now we'll watch her age and wither. Does she ever change out of those pajamas? What a shame." And they see me feeling productive because I'm getting out of the house to fetch the mail. Indoors, I putter quietly around the house, drowsy in the morning when my parents have already been up for two or three hours, and energetic by the time they've left to attend their own things - I rub my eyes and poof - I'm alone. The house is quiet. There's no one to talk to.

When I was younger, I relished afternoons like this because it meant I could watch television uninterrupted. Now, I don't really watch TV. I don't really know what's on TV and when I turn it on, it seems almost foreign. A strange cousin to the internet, more talkative, more boisterous. I always end up turning it off after channel surfing for two seconds.

The next best thing then, is to go online. After email, Facebook and occasionally, twitter, (though I still don't really understand the point), is surfing the internet, an activity I perfected (along with the masses in my generation) in college. It's aimless at first - bona-fide surfing - jumping from link to link, never knowing where the blue words might take you. Then you get smart and narrow down the scope to a few choice websites you go back to again and again to get everything: news, gossip, fashion, food, travel. The NYTimes.com is a favorite. I think ninety percent of the news I read comes from the NYTimes.com.The other ten percent is hearsay and a mishmash of outdated news magazines. Before I scoffed at the notion of paying for online journalism, but when they started charging a few weeks ago and limited the number of articles I could read for free, I panicked. I agonized for days, debating whether I should shell out four dollars a week (or something) to keep my NYTimes.com addiction while living frugally off the meager ten free-article allowance.

I even tried some other news sites: LATimes.com, boston.com, the SF Chronicle which online, inexplicably, is called SF Gate. But it was like trying to replace a beloved dog or switching to a new blogging platform.The layouts were weird and jumbled. The reporters seemed less motivated. I could have done it, switched to another, less expensive news source. Give me time and I'll adapt to anything. But it wasn't as though the NYTimes had burned to the ground and would never update their site again. The days ticked by and I began to feel my brain withering. Finally, the feeling that I was missing out and falling behind pulled my wallet out. Wasn't I falling behind in enough already? I imagined conversing at a dinner party with people who had read all ten articles on the "Most E-mailed" list and eliciting an embarrassing blank stare.

"I don't have a subscription," I imagined saying.
"Betty. It's four dollars. Even homeless people sometimes have four dollars."

The least I could do was stay on top of the news (and the weddings and celebrations of the upper classes). I made up my mind and paid to stay in the know.

After I devour the NYTimes I head over to People.com to see what my friends in Hollywood are up to. It's not a guilty pleasure. Not anymore. Before, I'd close the page whenever someone walked into my room and open the NYTimes.com tab, making sure to scroll down to the middle or open up some random article on Bernie Madoff or testicular cancer. I have a blog called "Very Highbrow" and when you have a blog named such, you have to keep up appearances. But that got old real fast because sometimes, all I want to read about is why Taylor Swift broke up with Taylor Lautner and what the hell Lady Gaga was thinking, wearing meat to some awards show. Now when someone walks in and I'm surfing People.com, I say, "Hey, come and check out what my husband Shia (LaBeouf) is up to." Chances are, people will say, "Oh that chump? Okay. Show me."

And after all that, it's only about 1:30pm. Now I'm desperate. The day seems interminable now - and if the weather is anything like today's - grey, overcast, chilly...a mirage of perpetual early morning- I can't even develop a biological sense of time. I start to fear nightfall because I know it will come swiftly and in a blink of an eye I'll be sitting by lamplight, wondering what the hell I did with my day. That's when I think, "Alright. I'll write to pass the time."

And I do. I write. Something. Anything. Like this entry about getting the mail and my favorite websites. And it's got a few paragraphs. It seems long-ish. I lean back now, ready to put my feet up, ready to click "Publish post," but not before I glance at the time: 1:58 pm.

Now what do I do?

Crunch Time

I suppose I should write and say that I've got a job. It's not a full-time job but it pays, a rarity for all the positions listed on my resume. It helps to be open - if I had to give advice to all those people on the cusp of graduating, I'd say, "One, be patient. Two, be open." When it comes to dispensing advice like this, people say, "You're only twenty-five. What do you know." Yet when it comes to job-hunting, graduating, people think, "You're twenty-five. Get a move on!" Or maybe they don't, but I do.

Recently I've been feeling young, then old, then young again. It's not anything I'm doing in particular; changing my hair and losing a few pounds seems to fall somewhere in between any sort of age gap. It's strange, fitting into old clothes that are basically new because I've never worn them before. I hang out with old friends while making new plans. I eat dinner with my aging parents and their aging parents, completely aware of the chronological distance that connects yet divides us. I'm sitting in their present, they in mine, yet inside our clocks are ticking in completely different time zones.

Around me, things are changing at warp speed, but my eyes feel locked in place. People are graduating. Babies I thought would never grow up are walking, reaching out for their diplomas. My cousins are working, saving towards houses and now, college funds - someone is pregnant and other pregnancies are sure to follow. Friends have gotten Master's degrees and some are contemplating PhDs. It's strange, to see all this and feel waves of happiness and waves of nothing. Nothing at all - not bitterness or jealousy or voluntary detachment, but most accurately, awe. Awed that things can change so quickly with or without you. And this is where the happiness comes in, because I am part of it. I am part of their lives and they a part of mine - and yet. Yet. Something brews inside me - a quicksilver question mark. Where do I fit in? 

Though I dislike school, I will never stop being a student. Perhaps at heart I am an anthropologist. Perhaps all English majors, readers and writers are. The vocabulary of school has been drilled into me and with it I describe my actions: I study those around me. Learn, take notes from model students: other human beings who live the way I hope to. The exams are not so different, just unpredictable and unwritten. It's been this way for twenty-five years - though perhaps for the first five, I wasn't a very good student. But now I think I've gotten closer to the top than I've ever been - the results of course aren't in yet, but the notes are down. I've written them down neatly in pen. And I'm studying too... it's just a matter of when. When and where will I apply what I've learned? This is life's greatest test. The part where you are asked to sit and write - or, to stand up and act. Or sit and write.

Z Pool Men

Every Friday morning between 10 and 11:30 am, our pool man comes. As most pool men do, he drives a small truck and works alone, wearing faded shorts, a t-shirt, and if he feels like it, a baseball cap to protect his crown. The most extravagant thing about his ensemble is perhaps the pair of Oakley sunglasses he is never without and which protect his fifty-something year old eyes from the glare of pool water. I know they are Oakley because once on a particularly hot day, I walked outside to say hello and stood less than two feet away from him.

Mostly though, I see him through our kitchen window - our kitchen is bright in the mornings, but compared to our backyard, it seems almost cavern-like and I feel like a goblin lurking and leering at a nameless, sun-kissed king.

It's true, I don't know his name. He is the second pool man we've had since moving here, the first being Frank something-or-other. Frank was tall, lean, lanky and sixty-something, with a boyish gait and fine blond hairs running down his arms and legs that disappeared into socks white as alabaster and tennis shoes to match. One got the impression that after cleaning all those pools, he drove down to the country club and played a few sets. His car was a gleaming fire-red pick-up with a license plate that said "ZPoolMan," which taught me at a young age that to take pride in one's profession is one of the most attractive things a person can do.

Many times, I imagined a conversation between me and Frank where I asked him why he became a pool man. Had he always been one? Did he go to college? If so, what did he major in? Did he struggle to support his family? Did his wife work too? Where did he live? Did he have a pool?

My parents, when they first moved here, were perhaps unaccustomed to seeing a tall white man in their backyard. They would stop just as I did by the window and marvel at this man at work. Frank, sometimes looking up from the water, would see us smiling at him. He'd give a little wave, and that was the extent of our interaction, except for once a month when a small white envelope would come in the mail - Frank's invoice. On Christmas, the invoice would be accompanied by a Christmas card, signed by Frank in an elegant hand, as though all the years of wielding a pool net had also improved his penmanship - or perhaps it was the other way around. The week before Christmas my father would wrap a bottle of wine and a box of chocolates and have me bring it to Frank. The gift was always the same, and his reaction was always the same.


"Well isn't that nice," he would say, "Thank you very much." He would put the bag down by his dolly and go back to whatever he was doing, not languidly, but slowly and methodically as though our pool was the only one he had to clean that day. 


He came and left quietly through the side yard, each time reaching over with his long arms to unlock the door, striding in with his supplies in tow on a white dolly. He didn't need much: a plastic bucket or two filled with strange, neon-colored liquids which he emptied by the gallon into our pool; a long plastic tube; a wide-mouthed net and some chemical indicators that he kept in his pocket. All these things loaded neatly onto the dolly and the dolly loaded neatly into the bed of his truck. Our pool was never very dirty unless the Santa Ana winds came, but after he left the water seemed to sparkle as though it were crystal, like he'd polished it with some magic wave of his hands.

I trusted Frank to keep the water friendly and safe. It never stung my eyes, never smelled like those public pools, more chlorine than water and though I knew he had no control over the temperature, I always attributed the summer water - perfectly cool, perfectly warm - to him. His art. He cleaned quickly and quietly, even more so because I was inside with the door closed. Through the window I felt as though I were watching an old film, restored. Occasionally I saw an earphone peaking out from his ears, and he'd lightly bob his head to some tune, coming from the Walkman clipped to his waistband. If I wasn't paying attention, I would look up a few moments later and find the backyard empty except for the swaying trees and soft ripples of clean pool water. Frank slipped in and out like a kind-hearted burglar, the only thing he would take were the floating dead leaves, leaving behind clear sparkling water that beckoned living, swimming bodies.
   
Sometime after high school Frank stopped coming. The red truck was replaced by a shiny blue one, the license plate of which I never bothered to read. At first I did not notice it was not Frank, for this new pool man's silhouette was so much like his predecessor's, until one morning I noticed the truck and said to my father, "Did Frank get a new truck?"

My father gave me a strange look. "Frank's retired. This is a new guy."

I squinted out the window. It wasn't Frank. This man was just as tall and lean, and though he moved more hurriedly than Frank did, there was something familiar about his gait; the flow with which he worked, I had seen it before.

"Frank's son?"

"No," my dad said, "Too old to be his son. Just a friend, I guess. Frank referred him."

Z Pool Men, I thought, all of one breed. Lanky guys who could have been athletes - and maybe had been, when they were younger - but who had discovered a singular secret to life. The meditative art of pool cleaning. I wondered where Frank was then. Perhaps lounging by his own pool, drinking a beer and listening to his music, flowing freely from an old stereo while some younger man cleaned his pool.

Fish

A few months ago my mother asked me to buy her a fish.
"Just a little one," she said, showing me an inch of space between her thumb and forefinger.
I looked up from the magazine I was reading and wondered where in the world I would find a fish that size. Trader Joe's? Whole Foods?
"Not to eat, dummy. A live one, for my lily plants outside. I read somewhere that the fish keeps the roots free of algae and parasites."
I nodded, relieved that I would not have to make a fool of myself at the grocery store, asking the butcher to wrap up one anchovy.
"Sure, I'll get you a little fish."

A week or so later, the lily plant was dead but the little fish was thriving. Well, thriving in the only way a small fish is able to, alone in a big porcelain pot, the only view being the one above. Occasionally my mother looked in on him and smiled. As the days wore on however, my mother forgot that he was there. Luckily for him, it rained plenty in the past few months. There wasn't any danger of him running out of water to swim in.

This morning, nearly three months after I'd brought the little fish home, my mother asked me to buy two more small fish.
"What happened to the first one? Did he die?"
"Oh no," she said, "He's fine. We just reconnected."
She had wanted to use the porcelain pot for an orchid that had grown out of its old pot (my mother is, among many things, a member of the Orchid Society) and before turning the pot over to dump the water out, had noticed a sliver of a shadow. The fish was alive! It swam hurriedly around the pot, visibly disturbed by the sudden shifting and sloshing of its habitat. Where to go? What to do? But my mother is a kind soul - a Buddhist at heart if not by practice - and she immediately replaced the pot and stared intently into the water. The little fish rocked nervously in the water. It seemed even smaller than she'd remembered. Guilt consumed her. She had left the poor little fish in there; forgotten all about him, without even a dying lily plant to feed off! Yet somehow he had survived and still had the energy to swim about.

"Do fish eat?" My mother asked.
I stared at her incredulously.
"Of course they eat!" (I was practically sputtering, in the same way my father does when he tries to explain something utterly obvious), "They eat bugs and stuff." I tried to lace my words with as much authority as I could but secretly I marveled at the little fish. How saint-like of him to swim and swim in that dark hole with nothing to eat but the unfortunate gnat or mosquito that fell in. His eyes spoke plaintively: he waited for deliverance. What a merciless existence! What monk-like patience!

"We ought to name that little fish," I said, "We ought to call him Nelson Mandela."
"Neslon who? It doesn't matter. I have to make it up to him. Go out today and buy him some friends."
"Friends!"
"Yes. And perhaps some food. I think he'd like that."

Little Fish seemed to be in no particular hurry for friends, so I washed my car first before heading out. On the street I drive nearly every day, I spotted a fish store that I had never seen before. "Tropical Fish," the sign said.

I hoped they would have less exotic specimens as I did not want Little Fish to get a complex. He was just a simple gold feeder fish, but I did not know this at the time. I walked through the door into the dim store, the only lights seem to come from the glowing rows of aquariums. It was uncomfortably warm and I wondered if anyone would come and help me.
"May I help you?" said a voice. A middle aged Chinese man appeared, drying his hands on a small towel. "What are you looking for?"
"I'd like to buy two little fish," I said, and held up my thumb and forefinger in the same way my mother had done a few months before.
"Little fish?" The man wrinkled his brow and looked back towards an even darker area of the store, from which a woman appeared. She was thin and her faded blouse had a Hawaiian print. 
"We have little fish," she said, "But would you be more specific?"
"Little Fish," I said, capitalizing the words in my head. "I'm trying to buy some fr- uh, companions for another fish at home."
The woman seized upon the situation much more swiftly than her husband could, who was still drying his hands in confusion. She could tell that I knew nothing about fish and that I was looking for feeder fish.

"You're looking for feeder fish."
She led me to a small tank at near the floor - a million little fish swam about under fluorescent lights. "You only want two?"
"I'm not going to feed them to anything. I just want them to be friends," I said.
She nodded seriously, though I sensed she thought I was crazy. She bagged the fish and gave me instructions on how not to kill them. Like eggs used for baking, I was to wait until the water was room temperature before adding them to other waters.
"Anything else?" she said.
"Some food."
She reached behind her and grabbed a small plastic jar. "For those fish, this food should be fine."
The total for the fish and the food was $4.25. Each fish was 39 cents.

"39 cents!" my mother cried, "You should have bought him more friends!"
"Fish don't need too many friends," I said.
"Oh they don't?" my mother said, raising an eyebrow.
"No. Little Fish did just fine for the past two months."
"Yes," my mother said, "But it's terrible to be alone for so long." She looked at me, "Could you be alone for that long?"
I thought about it even though I really didn't have to.
"No, I couldn't."
"Exactly." She picked up the bag and looked at the fish. The fish looked back. "Fish need friends just like my daughter needs friends."

Something to Think About: Astronauts

In last weekend's Financial Times (a very highbrow newspaper) I came across a series of interviews with astronauts from all around the world. I particularly liked what Jim Lovell had to say about his time in space:

“The impression I got up there wasn’t what the moon looked like so close up, but what the Earth looked like. The lunar flights give you a correct perception of our existence. You look back at Earth from the moon and you can put your thumb up to the window and hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything you’ve ever known is behind your thumb, and that blue-and-white ball is orbiting a rather normal star, tucked away on the outer edge of a galaxy. You realise how insignificant we really all are. Everything you’ve ever known – all those arguments and wars – is right behind your thumb.”

Time

For much of my life I've dreamed about being one of those early risers who jump out of bed at five or six am, run six miles, shower, put on a pot of coffee, read the paper, answer emails and who is out of the house by eight am to conquer the world. I dreamed about it because I often read about it in profiles of CEO's of big companies and of celebrities who look really good, despite grueling shooting schedules. There's something attractive about that sort of routine and the discipline it takes to execute it day after day after day. Unfortunately for me, I need eight hours of sleep, which gets horribly in the way of well-intentioned alarm-clock settings.

However, for about twice a year for a week or so I am up before the sun, a place in time even more foreign than any place abroad. If life is measured by a series of stolen moments and complete quiet, then I can imagine mine in a slideshow of dark windows that slowly transform into grey then slightly pink and orange skies, paired with the soundtrack of the morning: birds chirping, sprinklers running, the odd plop of the newspaper being delivered and another type of morning breath - air so crisp that you can almost hear it. This is my golden hour - something rare, cherished because I can only enjoy it when I've awakened naturally, not by alarm but by the mismatched internal rhythm of my heart, still ticking to some other timezone.

And now in my twenty-fifth year and having just returned from two months in Asia, I am both blessed and cursed with a spectacularly severe case of jet lag. Waking up for the third day in a row at 4:45 AM, I learn something about myself. Some people need the mornings to get a head start on their day - but I, at present still unemployed, am not in the position to need the extra hours. Companies don't rely on me to be a smoothly running machine, nor do I have children to fix breakfast or pack lunches for. I just have...time. So I take it in slowly, in doses of increasing sunlight until the sky is fully lit.

I spend the earliest hours in the kitchen, reading old TIME magazines and waiting for the sky to lighten. When the first band of faded pink begins to show, I step outside into the backyard and walk around the pool (in which yesterday there was a duck, who ignored me), wondering what it would be like to swim at this time (something I'll try during the summer). And there it is, the most elusive part of morning - all drawn together in a glorious sensory painting - more impressionistic than realistic, yet more vivid than either could ever portray: trees and grasses swaying, my own breath inhaling, and along with it, some flowery scent floating my way, still untouched by car exhaust and fertilizers. It introduces itself to me for the first time though most likely, it has always been there.

DO NOT FOLD

My diploma came in the mail last night in a thickish envelope.
    "Well, that certainly didn't take long," my dad said, but I wondered whether he meant the time it took me to graduate or the time the University took to mail it to me.
It's purposefully antiquated looking, as though the Chancellor personally dabbed it with coffee and set it out in the sun, and bears a rather regal looking gold seal at the bottom. "Seal of the University of California, 1868" it says in a ribbon that curves around an open book, surrounded by thin rays of light. And at the bottom, "Let there be light."
    "Shall we frame it?" my dad asked.
I shook my head, studying the words: "The Degree of Bachelor of Arts With a Major in English With All the Rights and Privileges Thereto Pertaining."
    "I'll just slip it into one of those sheet protector things," I said, "And uh, tack it up on my bulletin board."
    My father shrugged, "Suit yourself."
 
I rummaged around in the cupboard where we keep all our old school and office supplies. In a binder I'd used in high school that still held my tab dividers for AP US History and Honors Chem, I found a slightly creased page protector, left over from a report or something. The plastic was scuffed, but the words and the seal of my diploma would shine through regardless. I stood before the cupboard a moment longer, opening and closing the rest of the binders, wondering what out-dated academic treasures could be found. The past twenty or so years of my intellectual life, reduced to a single shelf in what ought to be a linen closet. And now, a college degree, sitting snugly in my hand in an old plastic sheet protector. Maybe I should frame it, I thought. Holding it gingerly between thumb and forefinger, I walked into my room, examining the wall space.

My desk occupies nearly an entire wall, the closet another. Then there are two large windows, my bed, the dresser, a full-length mirror, and any remaining spare wall is occupied by five pictures, all gifts from friends and family. The only blank wall left is the one opposite the door. I imagined hanging the diploma there in an ornate gold frame (to match the seal) so that whomever walked into my room would know right away what my alma mater was. If they failed to see it, I'd steer them back to the doorway and point it out. "There." I would say, "There is that paper that dodged me for six years. And there it is now. I have finally caught it. Caged it. Put it on display."

It was tempting, but. I sat down at my desk and opened my bottom left drawer, the one reserved for important documents (health insurance claims, tax forms, bank statements) and located the file. "School Stuff," it's labeled in my high school hand. I spied old SAT score reports, transcripts and college rejections and acceptances (the former outnumbering the latter). Years of labor and anxiety also reduced to a single file. Into it, I slipped the sheet protector. It stuck out a little, but for the most part seemed to belong.

Passengers

On the airplane I sat next to a Vietnamese woman from Ho Chi Minh City and a man without hands. She had busted teeth, the kind that slope outwards like a cracked damn and prevent the mouth from closing completely. She wasn't pretty, no, but she was friendly, smiling just as I sat down to show me her terrible teeth. She had a bad perm, blotchy skin, uninteresting clothes. I let her know with my eyes that I wouldn't be the kind of seatmate to just fall asleep for ten hours straight. I watch movies - three in a row sometimes, and I get up often - not necessarily to pee. Sometimes, just to walk around and pretend that I'm a flight attendant with the option to sit down and blend in.

The man without hands had hooks instead. I did a double take before common courtesy could knock me over the head. My eyes went wide and I stared for a millisecond. Then the knock came and I quickly looked away. Hooks. I wondered how he ate and more importantly, how he would fill out his customs declaration. Would he take an extremely long time in the bathroom? Probably. His pants, understandably, were elastic and linen - hooks and zippers spell disaster. He also wore sunglasses for most of the flight, which served, I guessed, to draw attention away from his hands. My initial reaction to him was, "God look at this fool with the sunglasses." Then looking down, "Oh he's got hooks for hands."

We sat, the three of us, in the very last row. Toothy and I on the left, near the windows, and Captain Hook in the aisle seat of the middle row. I didn't have to talk to them to know that their lives had been hard, and depending on their intentions going into the U.S., about to get a lot harder. Perhaps they'd just gone to visit relatives, but both were carrying crisp looking Vietnamese passports and Toothy at least seemed afraid the whole time that someone would steal her cheap nylon purse. She kept looping and relooping the strap around her thigh but it would loosen and fall in her sleep and she'd jump away as soon as the bag fell to the ground. Captain Hook on the other hand was the picture of calm, though his sunglasses might have hid anxious, shifty eyes. But I doubt it. His lips never so much as twitched during the entire flight and he sat stone still with his shaved head planted firmly against the headrest, slightly tilted upwards, lips effortlessly sealed as though he was the human black box. Indestructible, except for his hands.