Day 353 (Grandma/Cathy)

It is ten in the morning and here is this young Taiwanese woman with whom I teach. She is a good presence because she isn’t yet entirely jaded by the job. She likes kids at their best and hates them at their worst, like me. We are sort of on the same page, even if it is not the same book.

She brushes by me as we sort out the beginning of the cramped class. The lesson has not started yet and I am still perceiving elements with some clarity. What I sense as she has passed is a distinct, amber cloud that follows her. Do you know what that cloud is? My grandma’s perfume.

I want to tell her this, but I don’t know if she will think of it as a compliment. Even though I would tell her how much she should.

Day 277 (College)

Yesterday the class of 2011 graduated from Washington University in St. Louis. The ceremonies’ headliner was Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and human rights activist, who gave a speech with the title “Memory and Ethics.” The Friday was cloudy and cool at first, but over the course of the speeches the sun came out and graced graduates and onlookers alike, at least for a while. At the end of the ceremony, some former students threw their hats in exaltation. Others held on to them as keepsakes.

Today, the classless line either side of two desks arranged in the center of an apartment. They flip small paper cups that barely approximate Solo. Some are from the United States and do it with nonchalance and practice, despite the difference in the cups’ dimensions. Some are from Spain and England and are befuddled at first, though they soon perfect the technique. The floor is clean white tile and the living space is respectably sized. Near the end of the ceremony, a single cop arrives.

Day 275 (Latticework)

Commencement is nearly here. The graduates prepare their caps and gowns. They wish they had made dinner reservations further in advance. They get bombed on Natural Light. They hug their parents who are proud of their tired eyes. They have bad dreams about sleeping through ceremonies, about being denied their degrees, about sudden nakedness beneath the regal green and black polyester. They pray for sun.

In a country a few of the soon-to-be graduates call home, a graduate hikes his way up terraces of mud packed against tree roots. The rope tied between trees helps on the way up. Today, he happens to walk under the guidance of a SLU graduate. He thinks of Holmes Lounge for the first time in a year. He thinks of WILD for the first time in a year. The images in his head are vibrant. These things were real, he thinks. They were not formative years but years. My god.

To his left the roots of a series of trees form a lattice over the side of an enormous boulder. They are like a ladder to complement the rope that aids him on the right. They have taken over the boulder but not crushed it. The strands of roots seem to have connected somehow. Offshoots grow through offshoots. Their tan dryness is nearly uniform. The spaces between them make diamonds and triangles and squares.

Day 239 (If All Else Fails)

No matter what happens, I’ll always know that there are three pages of After the Quake in the Taipei City Library smeared with dots of Skyline Chili, born of a night of endorphin-high, aching legs after a lonely journey up a hill through a forest, then down stairs into the city, replenished by the hometown favorite farther from home than it’s ever been, which gives the night’s fan-blown tranquility a spice, of cinnamon or chocolate, whatever it is they put in there. Wordlessness has never been so welcome, white slippers on a dusty hardwood floor, some sort of sense of peace, of memory, of summed-up rest, not to be erased because chili stains are permanent, and library books stay library books, they have to for the duration, like some far-flung root.

Day 202 (The Pizza is Never as Good as You Think It Is Going to Be)

We are sitting at the slim red counter on red stools that try eagerly to be ergonomic. The pizza box atop the counter is open, its customary ribbon hastily cast to its side. In the box is a pizza. A Pizza Hut pizza, no less. The holy grail of pizzas in a land where thin, wafery crust is king. Wood-fired pizzas taste fantastic. They are not thick, though. They are not doughy. They are not propped up by acres of signage and branding that make the first bite a delectable consumerist sin.

For us, it is the nineteenth or twentieth bite. We are nearly halfway into our pizza. The sausage tastes like breakfast sausage. Breakfast sausage tastes good. We begin to talk of other pizzas: relishing Chicago deep dish and St. Louis’ Pi, binge-eating at Cici’s. Our visual cortices key off of past combinations of light and no longer the present one.

The pizza is good. Don’t get me wrong. It is not, though, as good as we thought it would be. Pizza would be solace. It would be salvation. It would fill our stomachs and then fill the rest of us, too. Its gastronomical procession would never end.

Such a thing is impossible. The pizza is finite. Soon enough, in the box remain only peppers between the cracks of the corrugated cardboard. Stomachs, happy for a time, begin eliminating straight away. Comfort recedes. The transparent door swings open and the sidewalk travels up to meet your feet.

Pizza is good. Pizza is temporal.

I believe in the archetype of pizza. The archetype never leaves.

Day 174 (West Virginia)

My stomach is happy with a burrito, wrapped in a toasted tortilla and stuffed with egg and chicken and salsa and refried beans by a long-haired French man who’s been in this seaside town, tending his groovy, Indian-themed restaurant for nearly thirteen years. And so, inspired, I sit on the low table with my feet on a low bench back in the restaurant downstairs of our hostel, waiting for the bus back north.

The five of us chat, unhurried after days swimming the beach and strolling through the night market and eating corn dogs. There is American music, stuff of the late 60s and early 70s, turned up and reverberating softly through the restaurant. The bar is fronted by a brown and white pattern of zig-zagged bricks. The shelf behind the bar is dark wood and holds bottles of wine and beer and whiskey. There are colorful cloth hangings on the wall. And then this chorus comes over the sound system, singing,

Country roads
take me home
to the place
I belong:
West Virginia.

And I’m not from there, but for a second it feels like I am.

Day 83 (A Web of Fuses Circular Like the Universe)

As I disembark—minding the gap as warned by the nameless faceless English speaker preserved in minds and hearts via the train’s ever-operational speaker system—I detect the faintest bouquet of something whose origin I can’t put my finger on and whose significance I can not even quantify until when—after some digging through the gray matter—it clicks that it is my grandparent’s condominium—though I think the word apartment first having not said condominium for so long—in Chicago that had two levels—or three, depending on how you look at it, or one—and a toy box—where I remember the addictive promise of the tin-coined slot machine and the throw-the-Velcro-balls-at-the-target set that someone would hang from the closet handle—and a glass table—where I would line up my cars when I was young and on whose sharp corners grandma would put the cushion of tennis balls—and a less-known series of doors where my grandpa—who showed me things from his childhood I couldn’t appreciate and gave me a metal gun that shot a cork that I could—used a computer touch pad instead of a mouse and entered the technological age before we did—though of course my dad might beg to differ—and that simple, un-put-your-finger-on-it-able scent that I am walking through small invisible cumulus clouds of in the train station and which is igniting in me these chain reactions—these tangents—that set one another off on into infinity.