ChaiTeaLatte

To a refugee camp at 14

Last week, two men came by to fix  floor boards damaged by a leak from the new refrigerator. The two had pulled up all the damaged boards and left the concrete sub-floor open to the air. The next day, while I was at work and Mom was home to 'supervise' the process, the two (immigrants from Vietnam) came by and laid down the new flooring. They did this beautifully. She talked to them while they worked (and all the while advised them to go to night school, which is the way she would talk to anybody and talked to my brother and I growing up. Go to school, go to school and work hard!) and when I got home from work she told me what they had told her. One of the young men went into a refugee camp at 14, hoping to come to the West, and made it to the US several years later. "People don't know how good it is here," he said to her. Mom asked him, "weren't you scared to go to the camp?" and he answered," I was young."

Moving the Story Forward

Another installment of microfiction. Slight, but, still, moving the story forward......

Sometimes 'Adrift" is not such a bad thing to be....

....here.

Four thin glasses made for Port, by hand

My friend K was supposed to come by the new place on Saturday, but couldn't. Mom is still here: water from the refrigerator flooded underneath the floorboards and what else could she do but cancel her flight? We are having the floor fixed, of course. It's a bit disconcerting to see the buckled up floor boards and the 'starting' cracks, but it will be replaced, so there's really no reason to worry. Instead of having a visitor, Mom and I went to the C------ galleria to look for a new suit for me (for work) and in the corner of one store full of thoroughly disposable stuff for students we found a window overlooking the Charles, toward Boston. I'll remember it for you - it's late afternoon or early evening and the light is turning slightly golden so the tall glass buildings are touched with the lightest gilt-film, almost like fluid specks of mercury, if mercury were more golden and not silver. You know? Anyway, the next work day, I found a package from K which contained four beautiful glasses, hand-made (for Port, she says). It's kind of an in-joke. We went to a patisserie once and shared chocolate desserts and she ordered Port and made me taste some, since I'm not much of a drinker, and refused at first. But little tastes with chocolate are just fine.

Patrick Hamilton and 20,000 Streets Under the Sky

A while back, I watched 20,000 Streets Under the Sky on BBCAmerica, based on the trilogy written by Patrick Hamilton. Tooling around the BBC links, I see Doris Lessing called him 'grossly neglected' and a 'marvellous novelist'. Don't you love having old standards rediscovered? Why do they get lost in the first place? Anyway, I've been meaning to mention the show for some time now and never got around to it. It is pretty standard "what you'd see on Masterpiece Theater" fare, except for one thing: the end. It seems fairly banal, interesting if you're interested in that sort of thing (and I am, I make no apologies for wanting to know the banal, rendered exotic by virtue of it being someone else's banal), but the very end, the very last scene, completely demolishes everything else that comes before. You know that funny pit in your stomach, that little ache you get, when you see through the daily artifice, and the daily artifice is useful, there's no denying that, to some underlying truth, however bleak? That's the last scene. I need to read these books.

An imaginary city named Urville

Here.

On the C train, this Saturday

We got on a new train: I mean, one of the new cars running on the green line. I love the new cars, the big picture windows and the way the seats face one another, the bright fluorescent lights and air that seems marginally fresher because of different filters, or something. It's still dirty, still subterranean and slightly nausea-inducing: the new cars rock just as much as the old ones. Anyway, Mom and I got on a car heading downtown and sat opposite one another, across the aisle on the new facing-each-other-seats. We found ourselves in the middle of a family group, Indians, visiting from New York (originally New Delhi). We found all of this out by a combination of eavesdropping and asking direct questions. Mom noticed the sea of desi-ness first, and sat at an angle, head cocked, round moon-face slightly turned, smiling. Hindi. They were speaking Hindi and the man sitting next to me, in a mix of Hindi and English, complained about his cell. "I'm not going to do this, it's so confusing," he says, loudly, into the earpiece. And then he clicked it off. "Oh," Mom says, "oh, you're from India?". Of course she knows the answer, it's just the beginning, an introduction, so that she can start the real business of sharing stories. "We've been here thirty-seven years," she says, with emphasis."Last time we went back, um, in 1993. 1993." One of the women in the group says, "It's changed a lot since then." Mom nods and nods, readying her next question, the next string of details and dates and pronouncements, connecting for a moment the threads that make up her life, the trials and travel and uncertainty that make up the experience of leaving an old home and making a new one. "Thirty-seven years, we've been here," she says.

"We'd often get a fresh-faced, idealistic teacher who had no doubt read Marx and Malcolm X and done an elective in post-colonial theory at polytechnic. We ate those suckers alive."

Nirpaul Singh Dhaliwal (via Harry's Place).

Update: Embarrassingly, I spelled Nirpal's first name incorrectly in my original post. I've probably misspelled something else in this update, but grammar and spelling were never my, er, cup of tea. And the spell check thingie on typepad has let me down before......)

Thanks, Sunny, for the correction.

"Through her, Wharton offers her vision of American tragedy:"

"...limitless possibility seems to surround us, and believing that limitless possibility exists may prevent us from deciding on the thing that might truly make us happy."

Carlene Bauer on The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (via Normblog).

Terry Gross interviews Ira Glass

Terry Gross interviewed Ira Glass from This American Life at Symphony Hall today, so Jonathan and I went to see the interview. You know how you listen to NPR and there's a live audience laughing away in the background (I always imagine some heavily bearded professor in a coat with elbow patches guffawing at a joke about jazz piano or photons or something)? Well, I guess I will be one of those guffawing audience members, although I have neither a beard nor a coat with elbow patches. Oh, and the link above is to the This American Life website, where they have an incredibly detailed, excruciatingly detailed, page on how to submit a story idea. It's actually a pretty funny read.