Q is for Quest

You go where you gaze.

This is the lesson, along with “slow in, fast out of the apex racing line” pounded into one’s head when one learns to race cars. Where I look is where I end up heading, where I carve my racing line.

I’ve raced at Thunderhill and Laguna Seca–eyes always on the destination coming out of turns. Steady. Unblinking.

Turn #8 at Laguna Seca is the infamous “corkscrew.” It is a blind turn and if you’re on a motorcycle, it is two turns. But in a car, you set your eye on a tree at the horizon, and even though the earth dives down so you can’t see what’s directly ahead so for a moment you feel like you’re flying as you aim the car towards the distant tree, the tip top of which is visible throughout. You have faith in your gaze. You rip through the corkscrew in a straight line. You do not look at the track. You look at the top of the tree until you come down, until you can see it in its entirety. And then you adjust your gaze again, to another destination.

Your gaze is your quest.

Even six years later, at a point in time I feel very few ill-effects from my left thalamic stroke, I’ll still have occasional post-stroke brain burps. Like when I walk down a flight of stairs; I’ll “lose track” of which foot I’m stepping. And “losing track” of which foot you’re stepping with as you walk down a flight of stairs means a potential tumble down the stairs.

I’ve tumbled down a flight of stairs and wrenched my rotato cuff–it is not fun. I remember envisioning myself falling and then I did just that.

The way I get out of this “brain confusion” is to gaze at where I want to go. I’ll just look at the next step. I refuse to imagine a fall. It helps me reset.

This is how I write my novel. I envision it finished.

Your quest is your dream.

***

Joining Heather’s Abecedary, Fog City Writer, and other writers like Susan Ito in working through the alphabet with short, memoir-like pieces. Except I’m going to go in reverse, beginning with “Z.” It’s called Alphabet: A History.

R is for Rabbi

It took three tries, as expected, for him to return my call.

“Hello, this is a message for Rabbi F. My name is Christine, and I want to convert to Judaism, and study with you. I would like to discuss next steps. Thank you.” I was nervous and overeager.

If I’d known better at the time, I might have, among other things, winced when saying my name, Christine, the most Christian (i.e., non-Jewish) name out there. I certainly winced for the next several years when introducing myself at shul. And sometimes the congregants would also wince and add, “Do you have a Jewish name, dear?” No, I did not. You don’t have one until you finish your conversion.

I called two more times.

After the third message, Rabbi F invited me to meet with him at the synagogue. I sat outside on the steps, intimidated by the doors of the synagogue. I couldn’t bring myself to knock on those huge wooden doors, or to open them. Eventually the rabbi came out looking for me. He wore black slacks and a white short sleeved shirt. He had a large white beard and wore eyeglasses and a kipa. “There you are,” he said, and introduced himself. His voice, the tempo of which was of someone who chose his words carefully, was higher than I’d expected. He did not put out his hand to shake. This was an Orthodox rabbi, and touch between men and women is forbidden. That much I knew. Thank goodness.

He led me inside. It was an old building, and his office was a small room off of the main room, steps from the wooden bimah. The three walls without a window in the office were covered floor to ceiling with books. The window faced north, so that the office was covered in the cold blue northern light I love.

I’d just graduated from college, and the bookshelves were familiar to me, even if the synagogue was not; I’d sat in offices like this before in Wheeler and Dwinelle Hall, during office hours with professors. Throughout my five years studying with Rabbi F, he would often stand up and pull a book off those shelves to seek answers.

He expected me to ask questions. This was a major paradigm shift for me. I was coming from a culture in which learning occurred by passive listening and memorizing what I was told. In which authority should not be questioned.

What do you mean? I asked. I was scared. Intimidated.

He replied by asking me a question. He asked how I expected to learn if I didn’t have any questions. He also said that by coming with my own questions each week, I would direct my own learning.

It made sense.

So each week, I came up with questions. I felt self-conscious coming up with questions, and even more so when I dared ask them. But I was rewarded; these questions would lead to lengthy and enriching discussions with the rabbi. And over the next few months and years, the questions begat more questions, and I began to feel more at ease with my curiosity. I became an actively curious person.

Years later, when I started teaching freshman comp, I remembered going through this paradigm shift. And I channeled the rabbi and shared the above anecdote, in hopes that my students would take the leap, dare to ask questions, and become more active learners.

And when I came across challenges, Rabbi F’s advice was always three dimensional, sometimes quite literally so. When it came time to consider meeting the Beit Din, he told me something that sticks to this day. “Identity is not just one thing: it is comprised of legal identity, community identity, and self identity. The Beit Din will approve your legal identity, the community, which includes your family, will define your social identity as a Jew, and last you have your self identity as a Jew. If you self identify as a Jew, that is the most important of all.”

Rabbi F changed my life in so many positive ways. He was my guide into Judaism (a world that did not always welcome me with open arms–and a world in which I often stumbled, like the time I saw a salmon fish cake and before I could think asked, “Is that a crab cake?” I had already hung my head by the time the cook uttered a disdainful “No.”), and I will be forever grateful to him for his wisdom and kindness. In so many ways (maybe all ways) my conversion process was a major paradigm shift–not the least of which was turning me into a more active student. I am a bolder, more curious, and more confident woman today having studied with Rabbi F. And perhaps I would not have become a writer if had not unearthed an adventurous and curious self.

*****

Joining Heather’s Abecedary, Fog City Writer, and other writers like Susan Ito in working through the alphabet with short, memoir-like pieces. Except I’m going to go in reverse, beginning with “Z.” It’s called Alphabet: A History.

Y is for Yard

When I was a little girl in Queens, our yard was the street, the playground, the corner store. It was in Queens where I gained an affinity for the tempo of a city, the rat-a-tat-a-tat metronome of jackhammers, car horns, manual cash registers, and games of punchball that forever set my personal pace for all things to come.

And where I finished growing up in the Los Angeles suburbs, our yard was the fenced-in portion of our property where I meandered without interaction. It was there that I built a keen interest in botany and gardening, as I learned the names of flora and learned to grow vegetables like only a girl without companions would. All the time reading book after book on companion planting and plant diseases and the various shapes of leaves, trying to satiate the rat-a-tat-a-tat tempo in my bones.

In Berkeley, home of naturalized[1] yards filled with twisting rosemary bushes and overgrown abutilon and bushy waist high heather, I learned to neglect our yard. And cook and eat lots of yummy good food[2] instead. And try to be a hippie and fail at doing so. And start writing a novel. Rat-a-tat-a-tat.

In NYC, our block is our yard. On our block is a photographer’s studio where lanky, underweight, freakishly tall women models venture, sometimes holding black leather folders. It is a warehouse where street food carts go to sleep at night, pushed there by weary East Village vendors of hot dogs, pretzels, nuts, and Halal dishes. Sometimes I want to sneak in there in the nighttime and see all the carts parked, and hear what is the vendors discuss at the end of their days.[3].

Our block is where construction forever takes place. It’s not unusual to find a backhoe on our street. Sometimes the street is neatly sealed, but weeks later, the street is re-opened and construction resumes. Our street is restaurants I’ve never visited.[4] It is a bar at which I always consider nursing a hard apple cider, but never do. It is the bar I’ve always fantasized about growing up–the place so convenient that it’s like a second living room.

Our yard is things yet undiscovered. Windows behind which anonymous people live. A brownstone that later turns out to be an understated B&B. A museum. An empty lot.

Our block is our yard. It is smeared with dog shit on some days, splashed with vomit and beer others, and then the rain comes and wipes it clean. Thousands of people cross our yard in an afternoon. It is never quiet. There is always a brisk breeze. In every minute, something changes in the yard.

Every yard becomes a part of me.

Every yard becomes me.

—

[1] Weedy

[2] The food in Berkeley is tremendous! You’d ditch gardening as a hobby and head straight to the farmers’ market for incredible meal ingredients and various restaurants for amazing food, too.

[3] They don’t tweet, so I don’t know. I know that @BigGayIceCream tweets their whereabouts and celebrity customers–do they talk about who visited their carts? Do they greet each other as friends? Do they go straight home? Do they arrange for a nightcap together?

[4] Wherever I live, if there’s a restaurant adjacent to me, and even if I live in the place for years, I find I never go to the place across the street. So weird.

***

Joining Heather’s Abecedary, Fog City Writer, and other writers in working through the alphabet with short, memoir-like pieces. Except I’m going to go in reverse, beginning with “Z.” It’s called Alphabet: A History.

*I inadvertently skipped the letter “Y”–it’s here now, albeit out of sequence.

**AWGH. And this is when I realize I *did* do “Y” (Y is for Yellowstone).

S is for Stallion

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” –Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

I will never forget my first day of nursery school in New York City. My mother and I engaged in a weeks-long prelude of excited preparation, coordinating an outfit (a red dress with a peter pan collar, paired with patent mary janes–though as the diva I always was, I really wanted RED stride rite mary janes), and memorizing important phrases (“Where is the bathroom?”); there was enough anxiety and anticipation and focused effort to know that this was a Big Deal.

I was born in the U.S., but I didn’t speak a word of English. My mother and father carried me as a toddler years previous to the preschool and asked the principal for advice on how to spare me the handicap of accented English. “Leave her to me,” the principal had said, “I’ll teach her English. Don’t teach her a word yourself.”

That this is a testament to the suffering of my mom and dad in the still-blatantly-racist-1970s makes my chest and teeth clench.

And so it was that I learned to speak English with a southern twang, inherited by not my family legacy, and not my cultural history, but someone’s name I no longer know and a face I do not remember: GEED-tar, for guitar…PRAW-doos, for produce…IN-sur-ance for inSURance…

It was an English that drew lots of teasing once I moved to California.[1]

On my first day of school,[2] I held the bus driver’s hand. I had never left home on my own before. And here I was, leaving home for the first time in an unfamiliar bus with an old white dude wearing oversized sunglasses that looked like cataract sunglasses who looked nothing like my parents. Pictures in which I was not smiling were taken as I stood next to the bus driver who held my hand in his strange big bumpy warm hairy hand before I walked onto the bus. I was the only child on the bus.[3]

And after he pulled away, I panicked and I began to scream, because I felt like I’d never get back home again, because I thought I was getting fucking kidnapped by a man who had conned my parents into believing he was a bus driver, because I didn’t know who this man was, because I was going into the unknown. I began to slam the windows, demanding egress with my body and voice, because I didn’t know the words.

He stopped the bus. I quieted. And he buckled me in. Tight. He said harsh words to me, ones I understood as anger, ones after which I sat trembling and sobbing hiccups.

I’d never used a seatbelt before–when my father took us on drives, I stood upright in the footwells of the backseats, my hands wrapped around the headrests of the front seats (I still have a fond nostalgia for this dangerous memory). Seatbelted as I was, I felt pinned down. Tied down. Trapped. And I wept. I was going to die. And I had given up.

That was the first time I remember being broken.

You have to break to get stronger. Like stallions, we must be broken.

I got to school. These were the pre-ESL instruction days of 1977. The teachers had no idea what to do with a small child who spoke only a few survival words of English. They didn’t even have the wherewithal to at least point to crayon colors and announce the word for the color. They waved their hands in exasperation. And therefore, I became exasperated. I couldn’t tell them what I wanted and they couldn’t tell me what they wanted.

And so I screamed, “Bullow me!! Bullow me!” Which I’m sure sounded like, “Blow me! Blow me!”[4]

But what I was trying to assemble, as I recall, was a way to tell them to pay attention to me. “Bul-low” is a semblance of the Korean word “call,” and “me” was one of the only English words I knew. I didn’t let up.

And so they picked my body up, carried me across the nursery school room, and threw me in the bathroom stall, like a horse. When I recount this story, people are horrified. But it’s true. I was locked in a bathroom stall all day of my first day of school. Periodically, they would come by and say words that I surmised to mean, “Are you ready to come out now and behave?”

If you know me, then you know my response was a resounding wail. And a kick to the door.

They let me out at the end of the day for the bus ride home. I never told my parents what was happening at school. I am not sure why I never told them. Perhaps I thought it was my personal battle of wills. My desire to never be broken.

The next day, I must have been uncooperative yet again, because I ended up in the bathroom stall. I stayed there all day. I ate my lunch in there.

And then the next.

But eventually, and I do not know after how many days, I got out of that stall like any stallion brought into training. I had been broken. I behaved.

I learned the language in bits, and I’m going to say that I learned it on my fucking own, because no one knew how to really teach me until I reached a minimal level of competence. When they sang “This Land is My Land,” I hummed along, catching words here and there until I could assemble a lyric.[5]

I have been broken many times in my life. I have been brought close to death. I have been brought to wanting death more times than I can now count. Junior high and high school were torture and nearly killed me. I loved college, even though it nearly killed me too. I learned to grow a thicker skin, to experience new things broken and healed, like my heart. Each time, I was brought to my knees, emotions choked to within an inch of my life, stabbed so that the blood has flowed from my back and brought me to close to exsanguination, voice smothered so that the world has gone gray, my heart broken so that it could barely beat, but I survived. With scars. But stronger for the weakness.

—–

[1] HAHAHAAAA! Plan backfired! Dammit, we all come from somewhere! We might as well claim the places from which we come! Decades of California schooling and several boyfriends and a husband later, much of that dialect has been erased. I kind of miss it.

[2] That morning was a day that I believe was very much like this morning in NYC, because when I stepped outside and felt the cool air on my face and the determined and cool breeze rip through my cotton dress, I got a deja vu/flashback of my first day of school. These moments give me great delight and satisfaction, because they make me feel like I am FROM here, that I BELONG somewhere, that I CONNECT to this earth.

[3] Yes, it was a yellow SHORTBUS.

[4] In hindsight: how fitting! So precocious!

[5] To this day, I am hilariously awful at song lyrics. Instead of Van Halen’s “Panama!” I thought for years and years the song “Cannonball! Cannonball!” Or that Sting was singing, “I’m a pool heart ace, with every break you take…” But, I can hang in a Jewish synagogue without feeling awkward, making up Hebrew words as I sing along with the cantor and the congregation. No one has to know.

***

Joining Heather’s Abecedary, Fog City Writer, and other writers in working through the alphabet with short, memoir-like pieces. Except I’m going to go in reverse, beginning with “Z.” It’s called Alphabet: A History.

T is for Ten Years

This evening, after a day of errands and a lobster roll dinner, we parked our truck in front of our home and saw a pair of teva-sandaled feet pointing toward the fence, the body hidden by the hedge, next to our wooden gate. Someone was peering into our yard. Strange, especially on our very quiet street.

I stepped out of the truck as I called, “Can I HELP you?” to see a small eight year old child come out from behind the bushes. Followed by a gangly eleven year old girl. Followed by a middle aged woman with a white cane who I recognized as the previous owner of our house.

She, the previous owner, whom I will nickname “Jill,”[1] pops by every now and then (though I haven’t spotted her in a couple of years) to visit her old home. I’ve found her unapologetically wandering our backyard over the years, full of regrets (and boundary issues), holding a small girl’s hand and then a few years later, an additional younger boy’s hand.

I wondered what it was that brought Jill to the house today–and then it became crystal clear: that tomorrow is 9/11, the tenth anniversary of the day that terrorists hijacked commercial planes and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon…and let’s not forget the plane that, thanks to its passengers, crashed into a field instead of the White House/Camp David/?.

The WTC buildings fell–they exploded, they crumbled, they melted, they pancaked, they flattened, they imploded. And along with them, thousands of innocents. And all day, all I could do, as I sat a nation’s width away from Manhattan, was watch the television, and write blog updates on my blog. [2]

9/11 was the day that escrow on this house was supposed to close (and didn’t, because the banks all closed, because our world as we knew it, was falling apart, and things would never ever be the same again). Our escrow actually closed unceremoniously a couple of days later, when the banks reopened.

And so Jill roamed, a decade later, the grounds of her previous and our current home with her children in tow on the anniversary of the day this house changed hands. “I should have never sold this house,” she said.

We briefly updated Jill–and she, us with news of her divorce, a new home, her children’s names. I told Jill we’d painted her muraled nursery room, the very one she and her husband-at-the-time had so cherished and that we’d promised to preserve–that well, we had wanted to have children when we bought the place, but heartbroken, we painted the colorful nursery room a very adult light green and turned it officially, into an office.

What a difference a decade makes. [3]

—

[1] Her name is not really Jill.

[2] I deleted my old blog, but as we all know, nothing on the internet is ever truly deleted, especially with things like the web archive site. So, if you care to read it, my blog post from 9/11/2011 is here.

[3] I thought about doing a blog post exclusively about 9/11, but I couldn’t bear to–I’ve thought about, and lived it, everyday for the last ten years. I’ve never forgotten, will never forget, and do not need reminding. And there are so many wonderful memorial posts, like Meg Cabot’s brilliant and tear inducing recollection of her NYC 9/11 or Steve Almond’s amazing Rumpus essay on the decade following 9/11 that make me feel like others speak with much more eloquence about this dreadful anniversary.

***

Joining Heather’s Abecedary, Fog City Writer, and other writers in working through the alphabet with short, memoir-like pieces. Except I’m going to go in reverse, beginning with “Z.” It’s called Alphabet: A History.

U is for Urgency

My father keeps telling me how many years he has left to live, recalibrating his estimate each year, based on his general sense of wellbeing. He will occasionally announce like he did this year, “You know, I am 78. I have maybe 3 more good years left so I can travel. After that, maybe 5 years taking it easy. Then gone. Okay. Change channel to ESPN, please.” So far, he has outlived his original estimate years ago.

This does not alarm me–as my parents have been announcing their impending deaths my entire life, from the beginning of my remembering days. I once repeated Margaret Cho’s lines back with Korean accent-inflection and all to my mom, who began to giggle hysterically, seeing herself in Cho’s recollection and imitation of her Korean mother’s voicemails:

“BOOP! I have to tell you something. I just wanna tell yoooooou that Grandma and Grandpa, they are gonna die. *pause* I don’t know WHEN they’re gonna die, but sometime! So Mommy just tell you now, so when they die you’re not surprised. *pause* But don’t tell them! That’s not nice, that’s not nice! BOOP!”[1]

This is hilarious, because it is pretty much verbatim what my mother has told me. Except that in our household’s case, she kept telling me that she and Daddy were gonna die. Someday. And we should not be surprised. And that we needed to be independent. Because we could not depend on them to live forever. Because they could die tomorrow. (And let’s not even get started on my parental grandmother, my childhood live-in caregiver, reciting her funeral preferences to me as I fell asleep each night).

Of course, as “normal” as this all was to me, I started going to church on my own as an eight year old girl, surprising my atheist parents. It was a relief to discover the concept of Heaven and announce to my parents, “I am not afraid of Death!”[2] Humans are incredible at coping/adapting.

Ah, the things that war and early childhood suffering engenders! My war-surviving parents were blindsided by Death left and right, and they never wanted me to be blindsided. Perfect preparation for raising a writer, really.

This sense of impending death is useful in that it has provided me with an incredible sense of urgency and impatience my entire life. When in your head is the clear expectation that you or your loved ones could die any day and that the world could explode in guns and warfare, things get super crystal clear. And also, you make sure your pantry is never empty….just…in….case.[3]

When I got sick…this became less of a theory and more a reality. I really did have a stroke and it came out of nowhere, a freak event of a clot hurtling into the core of my brain, through a freak, previously undetected birth defect hole in my heart (which the doctor perfunctorily closed). I lost the ability to retrieve memories, and I had a fifteen minute short term memory (which eventually extended to a 60 minute short term memory, and then the ability to read a short story and remember it, after 6 months, etc., etc).[4] I couldn’t write fiction, let alone read fiction. I couldn’t return to writing my novel for two years.

The only thing I thought about, throughout my recovery, was regaining my ability to write. And in fact, the optimist in me was determined to come back as a BETTER writer, as inspired by Lance Armstrong (blood doping or not) as I was. I wrote in my diary everyday–sometimes it was gibberish. But mostly, it was a supplement to my damaged short term memory. Unlike Memento, I did not tattoo all that I had to remember (seriously inefficient!)–I wrote it down in my Moleskine journal, with timestamps, so that when someone would allude to something, I would rifle through the pages of my Moleskine until I found what had happened/been said previously.

But mostly, it was a record of my recovery, and it was my way of writing every single day. Oftentimes, I had to nap for hours after writing a single journal entry, because that very act would exhaust me/my brain. But I still did it. I wrote in an anonymous online journal about my recovery, where I gained some incredible friends who are still very good and close friends to this day. I just made sure to write. I was convinced that by doing so, I could reinforce writing capabilities and form new pathways in my brain that would make me a stronger writer. I wrote and I wrote. And I slept and slept afterward. And then I’d write. And sleep. Until I found myself itching to write fiction again, first in short spurts of descriptive paragraphs, and then finally, a short story.

Throughout this time, I was told I was back to normal more times than I could tolerate. But if I could not return to my novel writing, there was no way I was fully recovered. And I wondered about a life without writing fiction. I despaired. Deep inside, I knew I still had trouble remembering things, that part of my ability to retort wit/spontaneity was missing. I felt like a dull blade.

…and then, after two years of struggle, I woke up and blinked and everything was bright and sunny and calm and I realized I could remember things that I couldn’t previously remember. That I could remember people’s names again. That I could read something, and remember exact quotes and remember the exact page on which these quotes resided. That there was still a dark hole in my memory around the dates of my stroke that I had trouble remembering, but I could memorize license plates again while bored behind the wheel of my car.

And I could write my novel again. I nearly wept. But I didn’t, because my thalamus by that point had finally healed, and my coping ability had returned.[5]

The road back to my novel was graciously short, and yet simultaneously, way too long for my own comfort.

In the end, my novel benefited from that break. I returned with a greater urgency to finish and complete this novel. With a greater urgency about life and love itself. With a great understanding of this exigency. It’s been years since my stroke, and I still think about that time whenever I need to summon that need to finish/urge myself to move forward.[6]

[1] The thing is though: you can never prepare for Death. It sucks when it happens.

[2] I am no longer church-going or Christian. And I, like many Jews, am not really sure Heaven exists.

[3] On 9/11, right after the planes flew in to the WTC, my dad called me up and the first words out of his mouth were, “We are going to war! Prepare yourself! Go to store and buy water!”

[4] The only thing I was able to read and retain in those early months of stroke recovery was People magazine.

[5] Until I had fully healed, I wept with great ease. I just couldn’t control my emotions. Like a small child, I cried when I missed someone, and I cried when someone hurt my feelings, helpless without response.

[6] I try to engender the same sense of urgency in my students. I tell them we don’t have a lot of time. That we are in this basic skills class to remedy the last 10 years of ill preparation. That we have one semester, just a few months, to make up for all that lost time. That we are in it together.

***

Joining Heather’s Abecedary, Fog City Writer, and other writers in working through the alphabet with short, memoir-like pieces. Except I’m going to go in reverse, beginning with “Z.” It’s called Alphabet: A History.

V is for Value

V is for value.

*value |ˈvalyoō|

noun

1 the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance or preciousness of something : your support is of great value.

I deactivated my Facebook account. I plan on returning to Facebook, but I’m not sure for how long I will be away; even though I initially planned on returning to Facebook by my birthday, I am enjoying the silence and peace and even the Leo in me wonders if it’s even worth it to return to Facebook for birthday wishes. (But let’s face it, the best thing about Facebook is all the birthday wishes on August 19 one’s birthday)!  

While I valued many of the interactions on Facebook, they are superficial interactions that left me dissatisfied, and worst of all, insecure; the frequency with which I bantered on Facebook walls never seemed to deepen friendships.

Now, I’m not devaluing the worth of friendships built on the internet. I met my husband online years ago on a UNIX chat server, where we messaged each other for hours on end, held long and written discourse on matters that delved into the deep, because sometimes writing does that–it allows us to go to the heart of the matter and quickly. But there is something about FB that distills interactions to small talk. And a relationship cannot be built on small talk. 

And so Facebook started to decrease in value, and in fact took away from things that were more important to me: like my writing, my sense of wellbeing, my psychic safety. Thus, the break.

• the material or monetary worth of something : prints seldom rise in value | equipment is included up to a total value of $500.

The economy is teetering. Our country has had its credit rating lowered. The Dow has plummeted in response. What is the value of our money?

• the worth of something compared to the price paid or asked for it : at $12.50 the book is a good value.

I have gotten a bicycle here in California, the value of my health and the environment countering that of the convenience of my car. I want to be in excellent shape by 40. I want to be strong. I want to be fast. I want to be lean. I want to be more powerful at 40 than I was at 30. 

I live in Berkeley, and hills that were completely invisible to me as a car driver loom ahead of me on a bike. Too many times this week, I’ve said to myself, “I had no idea there was a hill there.”

But I like how it makes my body feel. I like the wind on my face. I like that it is good for my health. I like that it’s helping me shed weight (or at least, keep the weight that I lost walking around in NYC, off). I like that I’m giving the environment a break from my automobile. My bike is good value.

• the usefulness of something considered in respect of a particular purpose : some new drugs are of great value in treating cancer.

I edit and revise my novel. What is this word/scene/character’s value in the context of the novel? 

It’s hard to cut words, but I do. At this point, I’ve cut more words than are in the current version of my novel.  

• the relative rank, importance, or power of a playing card, chess piece, etc., according to the rules of the game.

I cleaned out my closet. Rummaged and evaluated the value of each item. What was its value to me? Would it be of more value to others?

Throwing away too-large clothes and telling myself that I will stay fit is a sign of hope. There is value in that, too. There is value in giving things away. There is value in editing down. There is value in making a promise to myself. 

I edit and revise my body–my body, I realized, is valuable. It failed me in the past, but it can be strong. It can be an asset. Taking care of my body gives me value. It gives my writing value. I’ve lost ten pounds this year, a goal I’ve had for awhile. I’m aiming for another ten pound loss, done in a healthy way. I started doing yoga. I got an activity monitor (a fitbit), which keeps me accountable. I don’t count calories (I counted them for a week, and it made me crazy, so I stopped). I just make sure to keep on moving, at least five miles a day. I have come to value my body.

2 ( values) a person’s principles or standards of behavior; one’s judgment of what is important in life : they internalize their parents’ rules and values.

Compassion. Straightforwardness. Loyalty. Bravery. 

3 the numerical amount denoted by an algebraic term; a magnitude, quantity, or number : the mean value of x | an accurate value for the mass of Venus.

There is sometimes a missing piece–the kind that has had me waking up on a bright and perfect morning in an organized room with a restless anxiety. 

4 Music the relative duration of the sound signified by a note.

I cannot sing well. My voice has no value. But it does not mean my voice has no value.

5 Linguistics the meaning of a word or other linguistic unit.

• the quality or tone of a spoken sound; the sound represented by a letter.

Shall vs. Will. 

6 Art the relative degree of lightness or darkness of a particular color : the artist has used adjacent color values as the landscape recedes.

The value of my denim jeans diminishes over time.

ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French, feminine past participle of valoir ‘be worth,’ from Latin valere.

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Joining Heather’s Abecedary and Fog City Writer in working through the alphabet with short, memoir-like pieces. Except I’m going to go in reverse, beginning with “Z.” It’s called Alphabet: A History.

W is for Wiener Dogs

I had just gone through a rough patch, the kind that leaves you looking for a new place to live, the kind that finds you living at a friend’s house for a month sharing a bed with a cat, even though you’re completely utterly allergic to cats, the kind that causes you to lose fifteen pounds inside of a month, the kind that leaves you oblivious to the compliments on the weight loss, the kind where the arrival at work each day is fraught with victory because you didn’t ram the car into the freeway divider at sixty miles per hour after all, the kind that ends on a rainy day when you decide to weed whack your friend’s backyard even though they didn’t ask you to weed whack and even though they urge you to come back indoors but you don’t stop until the waist-high weeds are gone and you’re covered head to toe in grassy confetti like breaded fish. And then you eat. And you sleep. And you can finally laugh. Not a lot, but you can laugh.

And then you think about where you’re going to live. You look at apartments in the City, because maybe it’s time after all to move to San Francisco. Or maybe it’s time to buy a small cottage in Berkeley. You call your old boss, a real estate broker. In the interim, you think you’re strong enough to go back to your apartment, the one that overlooks the apartment-of-the-guy-who-just-broke-your-fucking-heart.

And you get a dog.

You don’t know what kind of dog you get before you get the dog. But there’s a little diner you frequent on weekend mornings, the kind of diner with just eight seats, where everyone moves over one seat if needed. The kind of diner where the dishes are named after regulars. The kind of diner with a killer jive sandwich, which is like hash browns plus a frito-corn-ship scramble with hot sauce and jalapeños that you eat with gusto in your twenties because you haven’t yet been told you have high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

X is for x-ray

1.
My first x-ray was in a New York City emergency room. I don’t remember how old I was, only that I was able to walk, had upper teeth, and yet still in the young days of non-remembering; perhaps I was two? Perhaps I was younger? My mother tells me, “You were screaming. You were so white. So pale!” (The sardonic side of me remembers my sun-phobic mom’s voice as sounding very proud when she claimed I was “pale”)

I had fallen on my face and shattered all my front teeth. They took dental x-rays.

I remember hopping up and down on the bed, up for a bite of apple, down for the jump, up for a bite of apple; that was how my grandma fed me sometimes, scraping the flesh out of an apple so that it was a soft spoon of fruit. I remember falling off the bed, tumbling to the floor, feeling pain. Or maybe that was after I broke my teeth, the scraped apple flesh for a toothless mouth.

My mother tells me I fell while running towards my father, who had just come home from work. I was ecstatic about my dad’s arrival, per the usual. But that day, I fell on my face.

The ER pulled all my teeth and eventually, crowns were put in. The crowns got infected later, so they were pulled. So, no front teeth for years. My dad liked to give me carrots and watch me demolish them with only back molars with which to chew.

I didn’t have front teeth until the second grade. And then, only my central incisors. So that I looked like Bugs Bunny. My dad liked to give me carrots and watch me eat them with my two front incisors.

Y is for Yellowstone

I always wanted to take a cross-country automobile road trip, having never taken one as a small child. It just seemed so glamorous to me, so All-American; at the time, perhaps the two were linked securely in my mind. I wanted to sit in the backseat and watch the country roll by, eat McDonald’s, crash at roadside motels, wear the same outfit everyday in the same car. take pictures. As I grew older, I moved my seating position to the front passenger seat, but ever other detail of setting remained the same: shorts, sunglasses, fast food, a cooler full of snacks, a camera. It bloomed into a Romantic vision. I.wanted.to.do.this.

When I was eight years old, I announced my intention to my parents. “When I grow up I’m taking a road trip!”

With whom? They asked. They were bemused, I now realize.
By myself!
They were alarmed. It’s dangerous they said.
At the time I did not know why. I want to go, I said. I’ll go with a friend.
My father reassured me. You can go, just go with your husband.
I don’t have a husband.
When you have one.

Perhaps it’s no wonder I married a man who likes to drive, whose stress unwinds behind the wheel, the road unpeeling before him. He will drive for hours and hours and days on end.*

*Hrm. I just realized this trait and its link to a childhood goal. (Let me take a little time to bask in the epiphany).

But still–no mega-roadtrip for quite some time…until I was finally obliged in 2009. My husband drove. And drove. He drove through California, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah. He drove us to Yellowstone via Tahoe and back home to San Francisco the long way through Vegas. It was not technically cross-country (we fulfilled that dream of mine, later), but it was a roadtrip by every definition.

I was blissed out. We ate McDonald’s. We ate at old greasy roadside places, some very bad, some very good. I wore the same outfit the entire time. We ate food out of a cooler in the back. Our dogs slept the entire way. There were long and comfortable silences. Sometimes we had long and comfortable conversations. Good tunes on satellite radio. Everywhere we turned, the beautiful world was outside the windows. Sometimes there were cloudbursts. And sometimes there were places where the earth was so parched it had cracked. Wyoming was beautiful. The buttes in Idaho astounded me. At times, I saw no Asian people for miles, but I still saw Chinese restaurants with signs in ching-chong wonton font.

I was placeless. The setting changed by the second, as Yellowstone neared by every second. It was like floating, like being in limbo, except not.

When people ask me about Yellowstone, I say it’s pretty much, alongside Yosemite, the most beautiful place in the lower 48 states. (I’ve never been to Alaska or to Hawaii, so I can’t speak for them). I couldn’t stop taking pictures. We saw a Mama moose and her baby moose. A bear. Bison. Bald eagles. Innumerable elk. And incredible light. And color palettes that stretched my imagination.

But it was also the journey there that I found beautiful.

***

Joining Heather’s Abecedary and Fog City Writer in working through the alphabet with short, memoir-like pieces. Except I’m going to go in reverse, beginning with “Z.” It’s called Alphabet: A History.