Moments

      The people are colder, harder, stronger there—in New York. They walk like they have music in their ears and blinders on their eyes. Opening a door in that city is like opening a window on an airplane. 

            My dad had work to do there, in New York. He wanted my mom, my sister and me to fly in and visit for a couple of days. Literally, a couple of days were all we had. I was a junior at Berkeley High School, all the way across the country. The only other places I had traveled to were in the Midwest and in the south. I had never been out of the country, to Canada or Mexico even. I had also driven around the west with my family, but there were a lot of natural monuments involved, like the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley, which were very unlike New York. They were the opposite kinds of places, really. They were empty, peaceful and expansive. New York was loud, rushed and crowded.

      We flew in at night. We took a cab to the swanky hotel that my dad’s job had provided for him. We never stayed in places like that: overly trendy and expensive. But that’s what made it so exciting for us. On the way, I saw lights, lights, lights. And people. It was so late that it was early morning and I was exhausted and the whole thing seemed like a spooky, hazy dream. My sister, my mom and I arrived at the hotel and my dad was there waiting, ready to go. But I just got into bed and fell asleep.

      “It’s so pretty,” I heard my mom say, as she came through the door after my sister. And it was. There was a big window on one side of the room that looked out onto a building, and a sign on the front read Juilliard. 

            The next day, my dad made us get up early. My sister and I whined at him from under our covers.

            “We’ve gotta get moving. You’re only here a couple days, don’t you want to see some things?” he yelled, frustrated, as he paced around the hotel room. “Get up, get up, get up. Get dressed. Come on. Let’s go.”

            I don’t think we even had a real breakfast that day. We went to see the Statue of Liberty. We walked, took the subway and took cabs everywhere. I had heard about this method of living, I had seen it on TV—on Friends and Sex and the City—but I had never realized how it worked. New York is flat. You can walk for miles and not get tired. It’s nothing like Berkeley, which is covered with hills. So we took the subway and walked to some building where you could go up and look out on the water. There she was, the Statue of Liberty. She was green, like money. She was like a huge papier-mâché piñata, made with one-dollar bills, stuffed full of history. It was real foggy out on the water and she was hard to see, but she was there alright. And even though it’s so cliché, and though I was truly not expecting it, I felt very proud looking at her.

            Later we went to get sandwiches at a little deli nearby. We ate them as we walked down Wall Street, my dad taking pictures the whole time. There was so much business there, so much commotion and importance. There were big stone slabs scattered throughout the road leading up to the New York Stock Exchange. They were made to look like sculptures, but really they were to prevent cars from going through and crashing into the building. I remember thinking that this was very clever.

            We walked from famous location to famous location, from beautiful sculpture to beautiful sculpture. We went shopping at Bloomingdales and H & M, which they didn’t have in San Francisco yet. Even stores that we have in the Bay Area were bigger and more beautiful in New York, like the Levis store. Across from a lot of these stores is “Ground Zero”, where the Twin Towers once stood. These things next to each other, both a definition of New York, created such a strange juxtaposition, such a contradiction. And that’s how New York really was to me. Everyone was an artist and everyone worked at the deli. It was exactly how it was supposed to be, in every way, even if these ways didn’t really fit together. It was cliché after cliché falling on itself until I couldn’t even believe it was real, and then I realized it was, and somehow, it was not overdone, or cliché, anymore.

            Something about this place made me think differently about the world. How can people be more real in some places than in others? More human? Suddenly, I started my first notebook. And I wrote in it on the plane, all the way home.

* * *

       “Can you teach me how to play a song?” I asked him.

            “Start a band. That’s how you learn. Get your friends and just teach each other.”

            “That doesn’t even make sense. Can you just teach me a chord or something?”

            “Well, look: here’s D,” he said, as he grabbed the guitar and moved his fingers, without looking at the strings, into a mangled and confusing position. “Now try it.” He handed me the guitar.

            I forgot it. I wasn’t even really paying attention when he showed me.

            “Um, is it like this?” I said, embarrassed, already handing the guitar back to him. Why was I embarrassed?

            “D. You put one finger here, the next here—here, look.” He gave me back the guitar and moved my fingers like they weren’t attached to my hand. He pulled them in ways I’d never moved them and told me to hold that position and press hard. “Strum it.”

            It sounded horrible. My fingers couldn’t hold it. The tips hurt from pushing on the skinny metal strings and the muscles hurt from being so contorted. I was already frustrated. It was already unfair.

            “My hands are too small. Your hands are way bigger,” I said, handing the guitar back to my dad.

            “That has nothing to do with it. Just practice. Do D again.” He gave me back the guitar.

            Again, I forgot. “Like this?”

            “No.” He moved my fingers again.

            “It hurts!”

            “Just practice that one and it will stop hurting. You’ll get blisters and then it won’t hurt anymore. Just practice playing that over and over.” He was bored. He left the room.

            I gave up on that guitar for a while. But then, one day I wanted to learn again.

            “Can you teach me how to play a song? Just some simple song. Do you know any easy ones? Like really easy,” I asked him, holding the guitar.

            And, surprisingly, he taught me one.

            “What is this song?”

            “It’s a cowboy song.”

            “Where’d you learn it?”

            “A cowboy taught it to me,” he said seriously. I knew he was lying—joking. And yet, he never told me anything different, no matter how many times I asked.

            The song doesn’t really have a name, but the song is about a young man who is dying and each verse starts with oh bury me not, on the lone prairie and continues with different descriptions of the prairie, my favorite being the sandy sea. The last verse, though, is the most haunting of them all:

“Oh bury me not”,

But his voice failed there.

And we took no heed,

To his dying prayer.

In a narrow grave,

Just six by three,

We buried him there,

On the lone prairie.

And that was the last song I learned from my dad.

            After that, I was hooked. Hooked enough to do it all by myself. He wasn’t really around a lot because of work (he goes to L.A. to do a lot of his work. That’s where all the movies are now, L.A. He hardly ever works on one in the Bay Area anymore), so I really taught myself the rest. I went online and looked up the chords for songs I liked—mostly Dylan stuff. His songs are easy—beautiful words, but simple chords—so I learned many of them quickly. I loved the expression, the freedom. I was making something out of nothing. Music out of thin air. First, the room was empty, and then it was full. Full of song. There is power in that. 
 

* * *

            There was always The Mississippi House. Always. Well, that is until last year, when the hurricane blew it away. It was just blown away, out of existence, like the flames of birthday candles.

            It was a comfortable temperature in that house, unlike right outside it, where the old, rusty thermometer would rarely measure anything less than 100 degrees. There were always, without exception, fudge bars in the freezer and ice-tea in the fridge. Before we even got to the house, after getting off the plane and renting our car, we would go to the grocery store and buy, along with other items, these things, these necessities. It might even be late in the evening and we’d all be tired and anxious to just get to the house, to the beds, to smell those smells again and see those things that had always been there and would, we thought, always be. I guess we went to the store because we knew we’d regret, the next morning, not having gone, but mostly I think it was because it was tradition.

            There are home-movies of myself running around that house when I was two or three, singing and laughing. My sister was a baby in most of these videos, squirming on the floor, trying to stand by herself. My mother was usually near her, in some sort of outfit that would keep her cool, like shorts or, often, a long, cotton nightgown. My dad, always filming, was hardly ever in these videos. If not his face, though, you might recognize his hands and voice, both often being used to get me to stop singing and move out of the way of my sister and mother, who did not seek out the camera, as I did.

            My dad had grown up in the south, in Louisiana. His parents had moved to Mississippi at some point, and, due to circumstances or reasoning that I was not alive for, and therefore cannot understand, my parents bought a house down there. Right on the Gulf of Mexico. The back of our house faced the road and the front faced the Bayou (yes, they exist). Though my sister and I often swam in that water, in which we couldn’t even see our own feet, we were informed, much later, that crocodiles (or alligators. I still don’t know the difference) had been seen climbing out of it.

            We were ten minutes from the beach and spent many long hours there. The funny part about the beaches in Mississippi was that not many people could be seen there in the day. If you were to look out a window, maybe from inside an air-conditioned Wal-Mart, at a beach in that town, in the middle of the day, with the sun out, you’d wonder, where is everyone? But, once you stepped outside those automatic doors, you’d realize that it was just too hot to be outside on the beach. To sit outside for more than five minutes in that weather was torture. Instead, we, like many others, enjoyed going there in the evening, when the sun was setting. It would still be very warm out, but there was usually a cool breeze. And another funny thing about the beaches in Mississippi is that the water in the Gulf of Mexico is warm. It’s like a giant bathtub.

            Sometimes, my mom would get up really early in the morning and go down to the docks and buy fresh shrimp right off a boat. I clearly remember the look of her back as she stood at the sink, shelling and de-veining the shrimp. She was focused on it, and yet, she was somewhere else too. I guess that’s how most mothers are when they cook.

                        Yes, everyone around us had big hair, accents, and hospitality that we weren’t accustomed to.  Everyone did things slowly, especially talk, and cooked great food. Like New York, it was all the stereotypes you’d imagine, but there was something greater about it. It was worth more than people gave it credit for. It was pretty, in its own way. And it was sad. But it was real, and that was the most surprising thing about it.

            But then, it wasn’t real anymore. It disappeared. We hadn’t actually gone down to The House for a few years, when we saw the weather reports. Katrina—moving toward the Gulf Coast. All it meant to me, for a very long time, was a blue and white swirl on a map. It would jerk at a sort of Northwest angle, as it spun. And even when we got a call from a neighbor, telling us, that, yep, there was nothin’ left, it still didn’t really hit me. But my dad eventually decided he better go down there and see the damage.  He came back with his video camera, full of footage. There was the little road that ran along the beach, and then the bridge, and then the even smaller road that went through the woods to our little neighborhood. And all along this path, houses were destroyed, there was debris scattered everywhere. Skeletons of homes. No soul, no insides anymore. I was hardly a victim, compared to the people who lived in these houses all year, but I was hurt. I couldn’t watch it. I saw our street, suddenly, our house. There was some concrete there. Our refrigerator and our air-conditioner lay, on their sides, lonely, broken. There was a Barbie doll lying on the ground and dishes scattered around our property. It was true; it was gone. 
 

* * * 
 

      My life is an average one. I go to school, come home, do homework, eat dinner, watch T.V., do more homework, go to bed. But there are moments that have changed me. There are events that have made me different and have made the world look different from my eyes. If you looked at my life from high, high up, and far, far away, you would see nothing fascinating about it. Everything blurred together makes my life seem very insignificant, and that is how I see it most of the time. But if you got up real close, and could see every little feeling individually, you would notice moments of despair and revelation and discovery. Of learning and losing and absolute happiness. These are the moments that are so important, and yet, so easily forgotten. And these are the moments that define my life.