Daily writing prompt
What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like?
Brush hair.
Make coffee.
Pet cat for no less than five minutes.
Five minutes over. Keyboard now cat-free.
Write.
Author: Jinx
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One of the first things we did today was ride down to the dump I visited in February and drop off some of those boxes. The place looks almost normal tonight. Tim was pretty busy today. I let him have the car.
At work I got ready for Charlie’s return. Ran out Fritz, put some things into DBASE, and even put Mike Ashley and Curtis into Pagemaker. Charlie was pretty monosyllabic when he got home at 4:30. He asked me if it’s possible to get any food in the south that isn’t deep fried or cooked in pork fat. “Didn’t you notice how southern women are shaped when they hit forty?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “Like schmoos.”
After work, Tom picked me up and took me to see his new office. It’s in a completely different building from the one I visited on Friday, and he doesn’t have a cubicle but an office, with doors and windows. Security is terribly tight. He had to use a card to open about every door but the one to his office. When I pick him up, I’ll have to walk around to his window and rap on it.
I believe this was one of my first experiences with plastic cards being used as keys.
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The same “aspects” that make all living things unqiue. Appearance, health, memories, personality, history, likes, dislikes, loves, hates, etc.
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When I got back to King’s Cross I decided to check my email again at the local library. This time the little room with the table had some open seats, and I settled myself down in one of them to look over my inbox in relative comfort. Across from me a couple was sitting, a young girl with long straight hair looking at her laptop and next to her, her apparent boyfriend, tall, burly, round-faced, with a bandanna around his head, and a cellphone he couldn’t get to work.
She asked him a murmured question I couldn’t catch.
“Pretentious and in love with money, that’s what’s typical,” he growled in response, still staring down at his phone and working the buttons.
She murmured something else, sounding slightly doubtful.
“That’s what they’re like here. Pretentious and in love with money.”
Again, a murmur of doubt.
“Well you’ve come to the wrong bloody city then,” he said. “That’s what’s typical here. Pretentious and in love with money.” Then he gave up on his phone and went outside to see if he could catch a signal.
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Daily writing promptIf you could have something named after you, what would it be?
I even have a bust they could put in the lobby.
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For over a decade, in June and July, I have taught summer school. This is not connected in any way with the public school system. It’s one of those storefront supplemental schools found all over Asian neighborhoods, whether SF’s original Chinatown, or the working, less touristy versions in Oakland and out on San Bruno. Almost all of my students are either Chinese immigrants, or the children of Chinese immigrants. I teach three classes, grammar and punctuation Mondays, Wednesdays, and Friday, reading comprehension Tuesdays and Thursdays, grades 3-4 at 9:00 am, high school seniors and sophomores at 10:00 am, and middle schoolers at 11:00 am.
It is exhausting. I always come away wondering how teachers who do this full-time manage.
I love teaching. Last year was especially rewarding. For my middle-schoolers, I’d brought in a copy of Harriet the Spy and read to them for the last fifteen minutes of class.
I’d wondered if thirty 21st-century working class Asian-American kids immersed in online media would enjoy a story about a pre-internet 20th century, wealthy white child. My gamble paid off. They loved it. When I got to the moment when Harriet comes upon her friends reading her notebook, students gasped and looked at each other in horror. “But she wrote PRIVATE on the front!” one of the girls exclaimed, while the student next to her nodded, her eyes indignant. “They shouldn’t have read it!”
Best of all, one day I walked into my high school classroom and saw one of them reading Harriet the Spy. He’d checked it out of the library. I asked him about it. “My sister’s in your other class,” he told me. “All she talks about at dinner is this book. I want to know what happens next.”
This was wonderful, but even then, I wasn’t sure about coming back this year. When I started teaching summer school, I was in early middle age. Now I’m at an age younger news reporters sometimes call “elderly” and these classes are physically demanding. I am on my feet the whole time, have to stay alert to keep control of classes as large as thirty kids (The high schoolers are a minority) and invariably catch something one of the children have brought in. A roomful of children is a petri dish. Every year it’s been harder on me and it’s taken me a little longer to recover, even with the thermos of throat-coat tea I keep with me. Last summer, I ended up with a cough I didn’t shake until mid-September.
“I don’t think you should go back,” Michael said.
Will I? That question looms even larger now. In May, I usually get a phone call from the school’s headmistress about coming in to teach. Will I get that call this year? Will the school re-open this summer?
And if they call me, what will I say?
Yes. I think I’ll say yes. If they’ll have me, I will.
I think.
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It happened on my first airplane flight when I was two. Obviously, I had laughed before then, when I was delighted, or tickled, or even just because everyone around me was laughing and I knew that was a good thing.
My mother, who sat next to the window, held my baby sister and my father, who had the aisle seat, held me on his lap. This was the early sixties, when people still dressed up for airplane flights, and Dad was in a business suit with a dark jacket, a crisp white shirt and tie. Once we were airborne the stewardess came by, and my father asked if she’d bring me a cup of orange juice.
My sippy-cup, which I had mastered, was left behind. I did not know the word “trepidation” at that age, but that’s what I remember feeling as the stewardess returned holding out a small, white paper cup brimming with cold, sticky orange liquid. At my father’s urging — I think he said something like “show everyone what a big girl you are.” — I very cautiously took it, tilted it, and missed my mouth, emptying the entire contents onto him — tie, shirt, jacket — all of it.
I don’t remember what was said afterward, probably just the usual kerfuffle of the stewardess saying, “oh dear,” and Dad being mildly dismayed. The stewardess said she’d go get some napkins, and Dad added, “bring another cup of orange juice.”
And that’s when I lost it, not to a tantum, but to a rising boil of helpless giggles. “Deadpan” was another term I didn’t know, but that’s what he’d been. It was obvious to me I would just spill it all over him again, but there was my father, blandly, even cheerfully asking for yet another cup of orange juice to get poured onto his silk tie.
I could not stop, and the sight of the stewardess walking towards us, with her polite smile, holding out another brimming orange juice just made it worse. At last, she stood before us, offering me the cup, and that completely undid me to where I wriggled and screamed in Dad’s arms, helpless with laughter, and at the same time, aware that this had never happened before, that now, at last I got it. I understood why grown-ups laughed, and that laughter could seize someone as uncontrollably as crying did, except it felt good.
Honestly, I did my best. Once I’d regained control, I tried again and spilled it, and no, I was not trying to be funny. I was just as badly coordinated as most toddlers and trying to drink something from a non-sippy cup on a moving plane. I’m pretty sure we all gave up after that, and I was left in peace to giggle myself into exhaustion against Dad’s damp shirtfront. It was possibly the only time in history passengers on a plane were disturbed, not by a wailing baby, but one who was shrieking with laughter.
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Tuesday night was the Independent View party at KQED. After work at DS I took the Hayes all the way down to Market Street and got off near Fifth, intending to catch the 21 Bryant, which would let me off almost in front of KQEDS. I hate waiting for a bus, even when I have a book to read. My usual strategy is to walk along the bus route, periodically checking to see if it’s coming so I can hurry forward or double back to the bus stop. I walked to the stop near Fifth and Tehama. No sign of it. I walked another two blocks down to the next one. Still no sign. I walked
I had returned to my old neighborhood. The 21 was what I used to take back when I lived on Tehama with Tim. The neighborhood hasn’t changed much. There is still tht bare, backstage feel, still the mural of the beach on Bill Graham’s old building. The parking lot I used to cut through when I walked donw to the M&M for a sandwich is now fenced in. I can remeber the old parking lot attendant who used to work there telling me about seeing the concrete of the lot swell like a tide during the ’89 quake. We’d felt the house on Tehama rise and fall as if a giant had picked it up a couple of feet and dropped it.
So I walked, and walked, down Harrison past the End Up (visiting there one night with Scott Winnett, who stood beside me and made catty remarks about everyone’s clothes. The decor had reminded me of Rock City, a cheesy amusement park I used to visit in Lockout Mountain, which featured colored lights and plastic fairies stuck to cavern walls.) Past the Line Up (eating there with Michael and seeing a roach rise out of my salad, its antennae waving.) Down towards Eleventh Street (riding my bicycle to and from China Basin and my loft on Minna), down to the 16th Street Safeway… A bus didn’t show up until then. I was more than halfway to KQED. The bus was packed and I had to squeeze myself on. It wasn’t until I popped out at Mariposa that I realized Michael was on it too.
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Daily writing promptWhen you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
What I remember about that age is the extent to which everything and everyone around me loomed. This did not frighten me, but it did make me impatient to catch up with the rest of the world, which did not seem to be made with me in mind. Counters were unreachable, for one thing. So was the door handle at the kindgarten I attended. After my mother dropped me off and drove away, I would walk to the large door that was the entrance and stand, waiting patiently for someone to come along and open it. It took my mother and the teachers about a week to figure out why I was so frequently late.
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Laundry was first, and I did manage to get it done fairly early. While I was there, I finished A History of Private Life, Volume II. Then groceries. Then cooking. Tim busied himself cleaning out what is supposed to be his study, but which has been a storage room since we moved here. It’s quite empty now and my own office, never neat, is even more cluttered and ratty looking. Half-finished looks worse than not even started on.
Now there are cardboard boxes all over the place. At least they’re unpacked. The place looks like it did just after we moved in, only dirtier.
A HISTORY OF PRIVATE LIFE was a series of five massive, gorgeously illustrated volumes by various authors published from the 1980s into the 90s. They cover aspects of private life from the ancient world (Vol I, FROM PAGAN ROME TO BYZANTIUM) to the modern era, (Vol V, RIDDLES OF IDENTITY IN MODERN TIMES). I’d bought the first one while a student in North Carolina, and purchased the last one in San Francisco sometime in the early 90s.
What strikes me now is the bloody-minded determination of my hauling along a huge, expensive, hard-cover volume that covered my entire lap to read in the laundromat. I did, of course, have a car back then.
Pam Troy 