twosday

the relevant details

[toward some framing for this]

i’m surrounded by very good storytellers. my friends traffic in narrative, always sharing something – some memory, a movie watched or music listened to, new projects. my storytelling on the other hand, especially on my feet, is not the best. i fumble for words, but before that, for details. the most challenging thing about narration is knowing what to include or omit – how to make what’s in my head make sense to the people around me.

it seems to be partly a matter of social engagement – simultaneous pressures to share something good or entertaining, to do so in the proper timing and key, so that these moments of sharing will be followed by more.

(i use a metaphor of exchange, but it’s specifically obligational and ethical. i listen so that they listen to me later; i share because they also give me a part of themselves. to refuse to engage is like an affront, and worse, a reason to stop engagement altogether.)

i recently watched the movie funny people, and what struck me the most was how good at storytelling the comedians in the film are, and how much thought they put into writing jokes: knowing how to set up the narrative and how to maintain interest through their work of description. i thought as i watched that i would really like to be friends with those characters.

where the heart is, where the limbs rest, etc

my parents care for their new house in a way i’ve never seen in the home where i grew up. they purchase furniture very carefully, scanning magazines for inspiration. the pops sweeps away cobwebs from the uppermost corners of the ceilings; the crevices of the bathroom and kitchen tiles are kept void of any dark smudges. the beds in the rooms are always made, covered in what feels like egyptian cotton. they’ve even given the new house a name – Shifting Breeze – after the street that it’s on.

staying here is like staying at a hotel, a model home, or with a distant relative.

there was one afternoon over the 10-day trip when i had space and time to myself, which is unusual since i live alone. i sprawled my books, computer cords, and legs across the coffee table in the upstairs loft, and took advantage of the surround sound stereo system. the house is perched on a hill, 15 miles from the strip, 15 miles from noise. from this perch, sitting with myself, i started to grasp what i think is the point of this new home: it’s like my parents are cultivating a new energy and identity.

if our nameless old house is an artifact of dad’s experiments in furniture-making, pock-marked by physical traces (the dishwasher that leans out when opened, the uneven sealing of former baseboard heat, taped-over cracks in windows) of the time my parents were getting by, then Shifting Breeze is a monument to a certain kind of perfection (making it, not just getting by), practiced and paved for over the course of 30 years. the gate around their new community like an antidote to 30 years of living two blocks from the freeway and a liquor store, on a busy arterial that i once ran into without looking as a 7-year-old and got spanked for it. the furniture sets reflect a more precise bourgeois aesthetic. see: the wine cellar/fridge gracing the corner of the dining room.

i’m with them on the new house because despite the pretense to perfection, i still see what makes it not so, or i see the work, effort, and error that goes into it. the inspiration for the new home comes from two-year-old magazines. dad props wood under the sofa bed to keep it from falling. and that wine cellar in the corner is apparently too cold, my french in-laws tell me, set by me at a frigid 55 degrees.

musical imprints, pt ii

after i fiddled around with my cousin’s electric guitar for ten minutes, my nieces showed me what was what. they took to the mics and, with their dad at guitar, performed these for their captivated grand-aunts, tita, and grandmother:

(my nieces, 8 and 9 years old, they are wonderful and amazing. i marvel that they’ll be able to reference high school musical, bob dylan, and johnny cash and june carter in the same conversation.)

studies in devotion, home edition

st. therese is bright: sunlight, when seattle gets it, streams through the windowed wall on the short side of the building, better to reach families at the fountain during baptisms, of which there were three on the day i attended. three times, children were dunked head-first into the holy water fountain, emitting the most horrendous screams that make you wonder at the nature of that holy water.

the baptisms help explain the camaraderie at this church that day. so much hand-shaking, back-slapping, baby head-petting during all parts of the mass. the peace-doling portion lasted five minutes longer than usual, with people traversing across the church to give and receive peace, creating a din i’m unaccustomed to hearing in a catholic church. even without the baptisms, it’s clear that this parish is a social hub. me, i sat between two friends [of each other’s, not of mine], and spent a good part of the mass moving forward and back in my seat to accommodate exchanges of glances and words. it was warm and isolating at the same time.

—

this winter break, i came home to two of three parishes my family frequents.

we returned to st. phillips [cf this other post], not the usual parish but host to some of the most important events for the extended family, this time for my uncle/ninong’s funeral. our 7-family clan occupied less than 1/5 of the church, but it never felt so intimate, even at K’s wedding. i was seemingly exiled to the wing of the church that held the piano so that i could accompany the initially ornery singer for ‘ave maria’ and ‘amazing grace.’ [she let up once she saw me bawling in between songs.] but i knew everyone in the pews, i knew who was missing that morning because of work/distance and what details to remember so i could pass them on [cousin M cried. cousin R’s eulogy was unknowingly witty.], and i caught a reference to my family in the eulogy. afterwards, we hugged, gave peace and condolences, and caravaned in heavy rain to a military cemetery an hour away.

a week later i was up early again for simbang gabi at our usual parish, where my personal catholic milestones were marked. more dolor: the filipino priest gave a shoutout to his mother who had died the week before, embedded in a reminder of how pasko should be celebrated — “we sit together at christmas enjoying those with us, not knowing who may not be with us the next time.” some wet eyes, even if it was too early in the morning for tears. during the last ten minutes of the mass, pops and i rushed to the social hall to set the buffet and to prep the honey baked ham, realizing that it required some warming up before being served. oops. i love lucy-like hijinks ensued. the ham was eviscerated anyway, half-cold, 15 minutes later. folks were hungry.

i hear of simbang gabi’s around LA with dozens-strong choirs, a parole parade, tagalog mass, networked with other parishes. assumption’s stands on its own, and is cobbled together — with great love and as much care as they can give — maybe a month beforehand. the planning committee is populated with retirees, who also comprise the choir, who also cater the social, who also put the program together and photocopy, collate, and staple it the day before. i imagine this mass is anemic compared to the LA cathedral’s. i imagine an army of folks, mostly young people, in charge of the cathedral’s production. there’s charm, though, in the spirit of this simbang gabi put on by my parents and their catholic posse.

—

how i want to remember this winter break:

studies in devotion, time warp style

a way to synthesize clouds of thought that apparently have been incubating for four years, and to partially explain what seems [and only seems] to be my newfound piety. i offer an old journal entry, from aug 2004.

–

at times, when i’m sitting in church during another mindless homily or sermon, i’ll think to myself, ‘what is the point of all this? do people really believe this crap?’

the bigotry and hypocrisy of the church, with all its backwardness, was i thought the unchanging rock that would remind me of home, even when i was home. because i’ve been coming home for four or five years and each time my house feels less familiar. my house and the company in it.

so church. it’s supposed to be the final anchor. a church — any church, or maybe i should say the catholic faith — brings back that loving feeling.

on monday we went to st. phillip’s. or rather i was dragged there.

now i’ve come to expect certain things from my time in church, conditioned probably by hundreds of visits over the years. it’s necessary to maintain a certain level of silence, a distance even. no touching — though my family is steadily breaking that rule. reverence is demanded, even if it’s feigned. these rules, created in my head, seemed to go double for the men (mostly) at the altar. above all, ceremony is supreme. a lot of seeing and doing. the only hearing was of the word or song of god.

sitting in st. phillip’s on monday, i added to my mental notes about church: its immunity to advancement of any kind — morally, intellectually, but especially, i thought at the time, technologically. it felt good to be in a building that didn’t look like a tract home with standard ceiling heights and wall coloring. and this building wasn’t fake, this building and the religion it housed.

it felt really good not having a computer in front of me, or a tv, or a cup of overpriced coffee. church is a vacuum, where life and things can be suspended, but god [or something Big] exists in faith and form.

and then i noticed the tinny and piercing volume of the priest’s voice. they had installed a set of speakers halfway through the church to go with the set perched near the altar. the mic transmitted not only the word of father joe via low-quality sound, but also every clank and swoosh the mic could pick up.

the formerly distant clergy, whom i could only see and barely hear as a child, became uncomfortably familiar down to the bothersome details. the sound of cloth against metal when the priest wiped the rim of the chalice. the rustling of paper as he flipped to a reading in his bible. and even more disturbing, i suddenly knew him intimately as i sat 25 pews away. i heard his heavy breathing during a quiet moment. the whispered words that were between him and god as he blessed the bread and wine were broadcast throughout the cavernous church.

my faint prayer during mass for a swift passing of the hour in church is now a prayer that the priest not say — or i not hear — anything inappropriate. or anything that might shed light on the ceremonies of mass. because i don’t want to know. i want what i know about church to stay the same. or if i must learn something new, i want it to add to my view of the church as massive, unforgiving, ceremonial and stern.

smells like abroad

the returns of my people are starting, the first coming unexpectedly today with a phone call from D. her travels took her to egypt, with forays into tunisia and somewhere else, i forget where. over a sushi dinner at a restaurant with quite possibly the worst service in seattle and most overpriced menu, D regaled me with stories of living in cairo suburbs (a lot like parisian streets), holding other people’s purses and children on the metro, sharing water with strangers, sexual harassment in the market, and korean tourist sing-a-longs during a 230a pilgrimage up mt. sinai (’it was hard to feel like moses with that going on’). on her trip to tunisia, the child of the tourguide gifted her this:

that’s right, a headless camel on a magnet. it’s a pretty good parting gift.

D  hadn’t unpacked her shoulder bag, and so she pulled out goody after goody, including the camel magnet (and eventually the camel’s head), so that it seemed like there was a little part of egypt right at our table.

at one point she handed to me a worn book of postcards from tunisia. the whole night i had been trying to get a sense of what her environs were like for two months — what exactly a cairo suburb was, how it felt to walk around, what the heat was like — but it was only until i flipped through the photos of immaculate tunisian tourist spots that i got a whiff of what it must be like to live there, at least as a foreigner. really, it was the smell that gave her trip another dimension to me. the insides of cabs, the markets, the scarves of women she stood next to on the metro — i imagine their scent wafted into her purse, latched onto the small tchochkes she was pulling out onto the table in a sushi restaurant in seattle.

musical imprints

in the past year i’ve accumulated three cousins, an aunt, three nephews, and two nieces in vancouver. a veritable L family gaggle. i drove to vancouver for the nephews’ and nieces’ birthday party, bearing toys for the boys and flowers for the moms.

in L family fashion, the kids weren’t allowed to have their cake until they’d played games and sang songs for their guests. the song selection was excellent, if a bit dated. or excellent because dated. my nieces and nephew crooned 1930s standards and cowboy songs favored by their grandmother, who was in attendance. it reminded me that i probably have my mother to thank for instilling an appreciation for doo wop, simon & garfunkel, and neil diamond. johnny cash, billie holiday, and louis armstrong aren’t bad aesthetic bases to start from either.

15 years from now, when my nephews and nieces hear “help me make it through the night,” they’ll be catapulted back to these sunny moments in their backyard, next to their father accompanying on acoustic guitar, their voices echoing through a ten-year-old amp: a 1940s country dance hall moment transposed onto a scene of filipino immigrants outdoors, on the grass, in the pacific northwest suburbs.