Full Stop

We park differently, and our parking differently betrays the existential divide between us. She is a confident huntress, sly and patient, always gunning for a closer spot, tightly orbiting her destination until her quarry reveals itself and certain that it will. Whereas I am quick to settle and reluctant to risk a worse predicament, always preferring sure-but-distant spaces to the fearsome uncertainty that lies beyond them—an uncertainty that breathes in joy and blows out dread, all fangs and tentacles, come to life for the sole purpose of slightly inconveniencing my passengers and me.

Meant To Be

When we began the excruciating process of shopping for a house, we unknowingly divided the world into believers and nonbelievers.

On the one side, those kind souls eager to comfort in times of frustration and hopelessness, urging patience and always seeming to draw your eye to some divine schematic that, enlarged properly, clearly illustrated the smallness of your heartbreak when viewed in the context of a grand design.

And me on the other, never really feeling the pull of fate one way or another, never convinced that the dead ends led to a destiny more fitting for me, even when that destiny threw open its doors, offered up some comfortable patio furniture and invited me in.

Ghosts of Beach Street

And there's always Chinatown, where I am anchored. An infinitely layered and relentlessly delicious playground for me in all my permutations: the friend eager to catch up over dim sum and coconut buns, the idle bachelor in need of a destination for a long summer walk, the boyfriend flirting over plates of squid and tofu and egg, the brother too heartbroken to finish his dumplings, the husband being repeatedly cued to wipe some remarkable sauce off his chin.

Marks

 


I was introduced to The Winter of our Discontent when I was just out of college, where I had studied literature a bit but had never really enjoyed it. It was one of a handful of books—Hell's Angels and The Illustrated Man among them—that opened me up to reading and imparted me with certain images I still love and will never ever shake.

The astronauts drifting endlessly away from each other in space, the boozy journalist beset upon by bloodthirsty hooligans, the semi-suicidal man walking into the ocean and back out again, a razor blade in his pocket.

I only mention them now because I have started re-reading The Winter of our Discontent and it is stirring up all those old fondnesses.

So I am remembering those old books and the girl who lent them to me. And I am thinking it's a strange thing, the way different people leave their marks on you.