“Nothing is more fast than a clock,” said my father’s drinking buddy and partner-in-crime, Frank. “No matter how fast you go, you cannot beat a clock.” I had dragged Elijah with me to Wichita, land of boring sprawl and ubiquitous construction barrels, over the weekend, and he was being a very good sport about it. We were sitting beneath a colorful parasol at my dad’s second favorite restaurant in town, Souper Salad (his very favorite being the home of the Crystal Ship). My dad and Frank were reminiscing over their engineering days, discussing politics, complaining about work, and in general, talking a lot of bull while we ate our heavily dressed salad and soggy pasta. Frank explained how tired he was, as every morning, he has to get up at exactly 2:48 to begin his day.
“Why not 2:50?” I asked.
“Those two minutes make all the difference,” offered Elijah.
“Not two, three minute,” said Frank. “I were supposed to get up at 2:45!”
Frank’s right; the clock will beat all of us to the finish line in the end. Time has flown by so quickly that I can’t even keep up with the present; I’m still busy processing the past.
Back home, I let Elijah flip through photo albums of me growing up, lingering on the photos of my young self as a chubby little elf in dresses, rushing through the photos that documented my long awkward duckling phase. I took him by the building that formerly housed my mom’s cake shop, which was named after me - now it’s some café. I couldn’t even tell what type of food the café served. Some nondescript Asian guy was standing outside, smoking a cigarette and staring at me as I gaped at the new sign overhead. I felt like an intruder, so off I drove.
I took him by the old elementary school with the massive yard, where I had spent many days sitting on the field, alone, weaving endless dandelion chains. Then we made a stop by Joyland. I’d heard rumors that it had reopened under new management. Apparently it wasn’t officially reopened yet, or it just opened briefly and then folded under the weight of the massive debt and repairs needed to restore the place to a viable business. We stood outside the fence as Elijah took pictures - the rollercoaster, seemingly made entirely of matchsticks, that had decapitated a hapless gardener; the skating rink that had gone up in flames; promises of endless summer entertainment in flaking paint. In retrospect, Joyland was always kind of dilapidated and shitty; but it was what I knew - my humble little piece of Disneyland or Worlds of Fun.
The high point of the trip, for Elijah, was probably spending Easter at a Buddhist temple. Not the one I usually go to with my mother, the Buddha Casino; this time I went to one that Frank and my dad suggested. Frank’s sister used to manage this temple before going on to help establish a larger one in Georgia. In spite of familial ties, Frank did not seem particularly interested in sticking around during the service, nor did my dad. I looked up to see my dad quietly return his cushion and prayer book, and disappear from the room. I thought he’d just stepped outside to join Frank, who had been chatting up people (his favorite activity). After the prayer / meditation concluded, we went outside to look for him. His car was gone.
It was then that it suddenly hit me, how much I miss having my mother around.
Then, after the brief trip to the Buddhist temple, more driving, driving, driving - Wichita is all sprawl. We drove back home on Kellogg, past the bridge near Oliver, where I noted ahead of time the wall carvings on either side of the road. There are some fancy-esque designs, and quotes by Walt Whitman and John Milton, in tiny font. Of course it’s impossible to actually read the quotes on first glance, unless traffic has crawled to a halt in front of the wall for some reason - one can usually only get a “Fly, time! -” in before sailing past. I suppose that’s fitting.
In eight days, I’m accompanying Elijah on a trip to Europe, touring the Netherlands, Austria, and Germany. I’m still working through the steps that got me here: how I ended up with Elijah, separated from my ex (who is also dating someone else; our sixth year anniversary would have been in a couple of days), and how it is that I keep getting caught up with men who go to Germany. I have no complaints or regrets or anything of the kind; in fact I’m pretty excited about the trip (and the travel companion). I am just slow by nature, and the pace of life as of late has been a bit overwhelming. Chalk it up to being a crabby Cancer, I guess.
I spent this past weekend in good ol’ Wichita, land of construction barrels and proliferating chain restaurants, ringing in the new year with the family. I’m referring to the lunar new year, of course, which, as any Chinese or Vietnamese child knows, is objectively way better than the piddling, backwards Gregorian calendar version. Instead of getting regretfully drunk, the thing to do for the lunar new year is to gorge oneself on as much delicious food as possible, and of course, pillage one’s relatives and any moneyed adult for shiny red envelopes.
Cha-ching!
Yes, being showered with lucky money is very much preferable to being astoundingly hungover the next morning. The tradition, for those of you not in the know, is that all the adults will distribute little red envelopes, stuffed with crisp new bills from the bank, to all the children running around on New Year’s Day. Luckily for me, the definition of “children” has been stretched in my family to include “young adults with student loan debts.” Heh heh.
Aside from the money, and the wonderfully delicious food, the best part about lunar new year is the chance to spend time my extended family again. My cousins are turning out to be funny, if rather quirky, people, and it’s nice to see them grow up. (Although terribly, terribly shocking. Some of these kids were busy wetting their beds not too long ago, and now they are driving around in cars. Cars!) The great thing about hanging out with my cousins is that I have someone else, besides chiaroscuro, to commiserate with regarding the wild eccentricities of the family: the strange things we used to do as children (like ducking and covering whenever someone rang the doorbell, melting plastic Barbie heads in the sun, etc). The conversation this time around revolved around the mysterious man who lurks in the basement of my aunt’s house.
Some time, probably four or five years ago, I accompanied my mother on a visit to said house. Now, this particular aunt has an even looser grip on sanity than my mother (who, by the by, believes I shouldn’t think about moving to Portland, Oregon because of the danger of tsunamis) - she’s quite paranoid and doesn’t much care for leaving the house, except to visit her less hermited sisters. Anyway, my aunt needed to get something from the basement, so we followed her down. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a shadowy figure moving in one of the rooms, behind a half-open door.
“Who’s that?” I asked. My mom didn’t say anything then, but later she explained that this was my aunt’s “boyfriend” (which, in Vietnamese adult vernacular, can really mean anything from ‘friend who is male’ to ‘life partner.’ In this case, she meant that they are married).
“What? How long have they been dating? How come he never comes to any of the parties?” My maternal extended family in Wichita has get-togethers roughly once a month, and I had never seen anybody accompany my aunt before.
“Oh, he’s kind of, how you say, mental?” said my mom. “He doesn’t like people; he just stays at home.”
Hence began my mini-obsession with the crazy guy who dwells in my aunt’s basement. Apparently he’s the brother of a friend of my aunt’s; they met when she was visiting his house. Being that I’ve never seen the guy in direct light, let alone any interaction between the two, I’m not sure of the driving force behind the relationship. I do know that my aunt collects some sort of social security benefits for taking care of him. I don’t want to assume that my aunt just married him to collect a government paycheck, but then again, I can’t dismiss that possibility when it comes to my notoriously stingy, penny-pinching aunt.
Anyway, he’d never really come up into conversation among members of my family other than my mom and I, until about yesterday. So I’m a bit relieved that it wasn’t some shared hallucination between me and my mother, and mildly amused at the notion that my family has a basement lurker. If I were any younger, he might haunt my nightmares, but now I kind of wish I could befriend him, and maybe lure him out of his basement lair somehow (according to one of the cousins, he does mow the lawn sometimes). Maybe if he would come to our parties, he’d get over his fear of people. He could sit at the “kids” table, with the children and the rest of us who don’t speak Vietnamese! He could get to eat New Year’s Cake* with us and laugh at all the adults. It would be a grand time.
* - Actually a savory dish made with rice, beans, and egg, wrapped in banana leaves. Really tasty when fried.