Learned Helplessness

A sun with a strength to effloresce in the Northern California suburb enveloped the grids of homes that formed swirls of culs-de-sac, the leftover orchard trees that dot tightly fenced-in yards. Record highs for this December afternoon, said the voice on the alarm radio, 70 degrees Fahrenheit, but it should have been more like 59. The unexpected warmth made your armpits clammy and the soles of my feet sweaty. My socks absorbed the sweat, I tore off my leg warmers and lost them. I asked you where my roller skates were; they were white with lavender wheels. Your hair was in curlers and the scarf tied around your head was also lavender, like my roller skate wheels. You said they were packed away still, in the boxes in the garage. Parents do nothing but work all the time, you muttered without looking at me, so it would be a long time before we would get all the boxes unpacked and get fully situated in the new house. I asked you if it was a lie that my roller skates were in a box in the garage, and you said no, "and besides, you are not old enough for those skates, and they will be big. You have a tricycle." My tricycle was blue and very short, and it made me feel so small, and because it wasn't pink or lavender, I looked like a small boy every time I rode it across the tar-crusted asphalt of our new street. You had made my hair boyish, too. Blunt bangs and a tapered bowl of a mane.

       You handed me an orange with a hole in it, and then you stuck a straw in it. The sun bled into our kitchen from the garden window, and my mind began to recite the song from the Florida Natural Orange Juice commercial, the one that pictured a plump Valencia orange with a straw puncturing it. I loved it, and I was always asking you to please please please stick a straw in an orange for me, just like they do in that commercial. It was the first commercial I saw where I understood all the English words. Now, you announced that we were going to the park. I was allowed to take the orange.


        We hurried to shove my socks and shoes back, then headed for the door to face the electricity that was the sun that day. Suddenly, before we could reach the door, the doorbell rang, and before we could decide to look through the kitchen window to peer out at who it was, we heard rustling outside, and voices whispering to one another. Shadows passed by the window; we did not recognize the voices, we didn't recognize anything about the movement of the shadows. Our reaction, almost choreographed, was to crouch down into a corner of the kitchen. You chewed on the loose end of your tied scarf, and I became nauseated when I realized that neither of us knew if the front door was locked. My dad would be furious if he knew we were home by ourselves with the door unlocked.


"You have to go check and see if the door is locked," you told me. The voices were still outside, and there was scuttling and scratching noises coming from the same direction. I knew; the voices were trying to break in. I sucked on the straw, hoping that the fortifying orange juice would come flowing up into my mouth, but nothing. The desire for liquid in my mouth made my mouth dryer, and I felt my lips starting to chap at an alarming speed. I sucked harder on the straw until it hurt my cheeks. My grandmother held me by the waistband of my pants to insure that I wouldn't dart up from our safe corner. But then she loosened her grip and repeated, "you have to go check and see if the door is locked."


         As I crept out of the kitchen and turned a corner to face the front door, the floor beneath my feet started to tilt in the direction of the door. My socks slid on the hardwood, drawing me closer to the door, going faster than I wanted to go. I didn't think to turn the bolt, and instead, I tried pushing on the door with all my weight --all 50 pounds of it-- and I could feel the strangers on the other side of the door trying to push into the house. I had no strength in my arms, they were just flacid pieces of flesh.What were these strangers going to do? I couldn't see her but I knew my grandmother was no longer in the house with me. My face grew warm and my saliva turned into metal at the thought of being alone now.


        My back was turned to the door, I could feel a draft, it was opened a crack. With anticipation and with lifeless arms, I waited to see if all the strangers would come trampling in through the door. A rattle came from the ground and rose up into the rest of the house. I thought the earth was splitting open, it was a small quake. I looked down the hallway, now twice as long as it had been when I first walked toward the door, and the walls were suddenly pink with Autumn.


      I looked down at my legs, and I saw what looked to me like small children grabbing hold of my ankles. Suddenly, I was 20 years older, my body was inflated, my head nearly reaching the ceiling, and my arms involuntarily brushing up against the statue heads. The children tying my ankles down were laughing. I was certain they were laughing at me, but I didn't know what it was that had provoked them to start laughing. Probably my size, they were expecting me to be like them, small, but I was huge now. One of the children squeezed my ankles really tightly and squealed as I tried to scream in agony from the pain it caused. I couldn't scream, my voice was gone. The child saw my face, and in a frightened state, scurried toward the hall bathroom, which was now several yards farther down the hall than it had been before the walls turned pink and the statues heads started protruding through the stucco. The child messily scurried on all fours, like a feral animal, and turned into the bathroom. I tried to quickly run after him, but he was too fast for me as I had to pry my legs free from the cluster of children holding down my feet. I was terrified that the children would follow me and keep scraping at my shins and pulling me back toward the horrifying saint heads. My heavy legs stumbled down the hallway and I scraped my head against the ceiling stucco as I finally turned into the bathroom. There, I was met with a jarring sight.


        A litter of kittens, hungry, squealing, and round-faced, lay sprawled on the checkered tile floor. The child, looking dingy and insatiate, grabbed at one of the kittens and held it tightly in his dirty little. The kitten wheezed and looked as though it was being held too tightly, but as much as I grabbed for him, I couldn't  move my hands quickly enough. I couldn't speak, my tongue felt huge in my mouth. I needed to get this kitten and this whole litter away from this disgusting child.


        And then, everything turned into sand. I started shrinking back to the size of a normal girl, and all that could be seen was sand. I heard an older cat, perhaps the mother of the kittens, meowing. She sounded healthy, maybe even capable of scaring away the snarly little child from her litter. My eyes scanned the glowing sand for a horizon. I knew I would eventually turn into sand, too.


       It was obvious to me. The only thing left to do was to begin walking. I realized, once I began moving my legs, that despite walking in sand, I could suddenly maneuver my legs more easily. Walking felt good, the ache disappeared from my knees and the scratches from the children were healing, they were following me somehow. I wanted to roll in the sand, like I used to do when my family would spend summers on the beaches of Santa Cruz, scattered like a ribbon below the Boardwalk. It was one of my favorite things, rolling in warm sand. This sand was warm, too. Maybe I could roll in it and it would feel like a warm comforting bath, and I could stop worrying about the kittens and where they had gone.

I wanted to forget the children, too.


     I walked for a long time, I can't recall how long. A sharp, poke, one that felt like it came from an insect, drew my attention to my hands. Somehow, my wrists and hands had been bound by a muslin-like cloth. When I looked up from my hands, I felt something heavy like a sack, also made of the muslin cloth, fall from my head and obstruct my vision. I shook my head to remove the sack and realized it had been protecting my head from a blistering light, a red light, one that was acting like a sun as it shone, but it wasn't a sun. Maybe a lamp.





       Nothing happened for what seemed like a very long time. The light started to fade, and the sand was melting into concrete and broken pieces of asphalt. The vast openness started to fold into a series of dirt mounds and winding concrete roads. Still concealed as Bedouins, we had a birds-eye view of the civilization that lay before us. Several of the roads ended in a fenced-off series of buildings and smoke stacks. As I stared down at the buildings to figure out what kind of factory or plant I was looking at, a voice came on through a PA system: 


Good morning, this is Alonso Jacob with your Monday weather report. We couldn't ask for a better day for the first day of Winter. Right now it's fifty degrees and clear. We're expecting blue skies throughout the day. Though there is only a ten percent chance of showers, this good weather can't last forever. It's raining cats and dogs up north, so we should see rain by tomorrow. Remember your umbrellas! Now, stay tuned for local news.


        I was staring at a carbicide pesticide factory. This is where pesticides come from, I thought to myself. I looked around and pieced together the environment in which I stood. There was a loud moaning around me, consisting of several voices. The voices of women, children, dogs.


There are scheduled to be horrific births. It was the same startling voice from the PA system.


Is it fair to be curious about what a horrific birth looks like? You see, I don't know anything about horrific births, and many of the people I know do not know, either. Am I allowed to ask this- why are they horrific? What can I do for the horrific births? Isn't that question tragic and insulting and horrifying in itself?


What met my eyes at that moment was truly something that will never leave my mind. Children walking on webbed feet, dragging lifeless limbs across the rubble and broken piece of asphalt. Raw tumors in place of eyes, infants damaged with blindness, infants that will never experience a miracle that is to see with the eyes. Not that there was much pleasure or comfort that takes place in seeing their surroundings as they were in that capsule of reality. Groups of women sat along the dirt mounds, their limbs twisted or missing. A woman in the doorway of a convenient store close to the factory was giving birth to a baby with hare-lips, a cleft palate, webbed fingers; a fetus that was unrecognizable as a human.


       I am looking at the children, the victims of Bhopal. I am standing above the factory that is killing thousands. It is 1988 and we are remembering 1984. Carbide has left the plant and refuses to clean it. Dow Chemical will refuse to clean the factory. Apple computer will revolutionize the way Americans use computers and store files in their A-frame houses with composition tile roofs. I will ride my tricycle to the park, and you will help me learn how to measure sugar for cakes and say the names of all the colors in Italian.

When I Close My Eyes (at the office). . .

I day dream of escaping to some faraway place (like lots of people), and to me, it doesn't matter if it's a place I know or if it's somewhere totally unexplored. Recently, Argentina has been on my mind, for many reasons:

• my Grandmother is getting ready to migrate south for the Winter. Like a bird, she flies down to Argentina every year and stays in the seaside resort town of Mar Del Plata until Fall approaches. She used to stay longer and she used to fly solo, but this year, she will need our assistance. My mother and I will most likely accompany her there and back

• Ruthy (John's cousin) and I are planning a trip to Argentina for April, at which time I will most likely be helping my grandmother pack up her bags and migrate home for California's summer. However, going with Ruthy is most likely going to turn an otherwise straightforward and pleasant trip into a something outlandishly adventurous and epic. Going to a place you know well with someone who has never been makes the place into a completely unknown terrain, a fascinating world of things unearthed and corners undiscovered. There will likely be wanderlust (for Ruthy), late night sauntering, mid-morning tourist traps, and train rides filled with anticipatory chatting and pensive moods. I don't think anyone who meets Ruth is disappointed or can plan for a boring time. Ruth will very likely come back with five new admirers, hopefully none of them will make it into our suitcases.
  

• My parents are awaiting their first shipment of Argentine wines from Vina Santa Maria, a vineyard in my dad's home province of Mendoza. After careful planning and hefty investments, they are finally establishing a retirement plan that involves importing wines from Argentina. The best part about this plan; they have endless excuses for traveling to their home country, and most of it will likely qualify as tax write-offs.

• I haven't seen my extended family in 2 1/2 years.
  

• I stumbled upon this collage of windows in Buenos Aires by Karina Manghi, a very adorable Argentinian blogger. Really amazing how simple images evoke so much nostalgia and desire.
  

Balancing the Table

Thanksgiving at the Abdala house is hardly big, loud, or full of people. We are a small family, most of our relatives reside in Argentina, where Thanksgiving is not an observed holiday; it is seen more as a fun gringo day celebrating happy time, good company, and gluttony.
"I don't care what patron saint day we're celebrating today, it has nothing to do with me and my culture" was my dad's response to my mom's request that they accept a Turkey Day invitation from a neighbor, when they first moved to San Francisco in 1980. This is a picture of my dad on Thanksgiving a few years after he arrived, and he was still in the dark about the meaning or point of Thanksgiving.

-->

29 years later, the family has grown to enjoy, appreciate, and fully observe all American celebrated holidays. The evolution of our holiday menu is an accurate measure of how each of us has contributed our common heritage, our individual tastes, and our growing family traditions.

"If you aren't grilling something on the menu for tonight, then you shouldn't call yourself an Argentinean," says my uncle Perico, a bona fide gaucho and horse breeder who resides in the Andean countryside of Mendoza. We hardly spend holidays with him, which is quite a shame, but it is mostly due to his never having visited the U.S. He always tells us that if he ever does, the first place he wants to visit is Texas. "I want to see cowboys, I want to see their horses and eat their steak, I wonder if it's as good as ours."

Grilled steak in Argentina is soft, buttery, and it often resembles the meat pulled from a slow-cooking stew. The cows are grass-fed, the land is large, and there are enough cows in the country that there is hardly a need for factory farms. Meat is a manifestation of pride for the people of the country, so meat, from the time it is a cow’s living flesh, to the moment it is pinned to iron stakes over a roaring fire, is taken very seriously.

Grilled Turkey 

--> Through some bizarre extraterrestrial intervention—because nothing on Earth could explain this evolution— my mother and I are vegetarians. We do not embrace meat like “normal” people. In fact, according to my Uncle Perico, we might as well be considered shameful and "maybe a little sick" for voluntarily rejecting meat. Nevertheless, we swallow our ideologies and are mindful of the carnivores at holiday meals, and so we do partake in the meat and poultry preparation. Our turkeys, meats, carcasses, what have you, are usually cooked out on the grill. Unlike the grills that can be found in the Argentine countryside, which are usually the size of an entire living room, our home grills limit us to a few chickens or one large turkey and some steak at a time, in most cases. The recipe for this year's grilled turkey can also  be found in Sunset magazine. You have to butterfly the turkey, or cut off the back, so that bird can lie flat on the grill.*




*I am leaving this part of the menu to my mother, who does not get squeamish when she butchers birds. When it comes to mammals, she is more like me. We are shameful and "maybe a little sick" for not embracing meat, says my Uncle Perico and Aunt Nora (next to Perico below).

Spaghetti Squash Ravioli
-->

My mother understands why one must possess a certain kind of grace to enjoy cooking for a family and to cook really well at the same time. She has that kind of grace. She makes the time and finds the patience to master delicate raviolis made by hand, from scratch. She runs a business, manages a household, care for her mother, organizes her husband, coaches her employees, loses her cool, disciplines herself with yoga, but above all, she creates food. She lays out the handmade dough for the raviolis, spaces out spoonfuls of filling made from homegrown sage and spaghetti squash, and cuts out each square dumpling with precision. I think her decision to make pasta from scratch goes beyond how fantastic homemade pasta is compared to store-bought pasta. She remembers watching her Italian grandmother rise at six in the morning to handcraft the pasta for the family's Sunday dinners. In an effort to mirror her grandmother’s craft, my mother hasn’t bought a pasta machine, a dough churner, or any fancy equipment that couldn’t be found in stores in the 1950’s.  She keeps it simple, making fillings with soft cheeses and garden herbs in a pan over the stove, cutting the dough with a handheld dough cutter. I imagine the difference lies in her sauces. I envision her grandmother’s sauces as meat-based, heavy, thick with tomato, truly a rugged Calabria recipe. My mother’s are simple, light, earthy and aromatic.

I will have to sit down with her and jot down this recipe, she knows it from scratch and has a hard time coming up with directions for it. Here is a dough recipe and some dough-filling instructions that are similar to hers.

       My grandmother generally dislikes cooking, because she is a city diva, but she knows how to make a good batch of mashed potatoes, the Argentine way. Thus, this is always her job at every Thanksgiving or big dinner. We would never ask her to contribute anything else to the menu (for her sake and ours). She also knows how to set a very dignified and elegant table. How could she not, she is a city diva.


Criollo (cree-oyo) Mashed Potatoes

2 kilos (approx 4.5 pounds) russet potatoes
oil (preferably olive)
100 gramos (3 ounces) unsalted

milk
2 egg yolks

nutmeg
course salt
fresh ground pepper


You can leave the skins on or peel off, it your choice. Rub potatoes with oil. and place on a baking sheet. Bake potatoes in oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit, for  20 minutes.  At this point, check up on the potatoes, puncture surfaces with fork, and return to oven. Check the potatoes every 10-15 minutes, but don't leave potatoes in for more than 45 minutes. Potatoes should be tender, like baked potatoes. You should be able to stick a skewer or knife into the potato very easily.

Transfer potatoes to the stove, in a stockpot. Smash down the potatoes with a masher or a ladle. Add yolks, about 1/2 teaspoon or a few dashes of nutmeg, and a teaspoon of salt (or more, to taste). Over medium heat, mix together the ingredients. Add a stream of milk, no more than 1 cup, just enough to soften and blend the mashed potato mix. Stir until all the ingredients are well combined and the texture is light and fluffy. Serve warm.

It may seem odd to say that people “create foods.” I think the phrase expresses how a simple set of ingredients, which are themselves foods, are combined, augmented, and elaborated to take on a unique form that someone designs to be eaten. Everyone who has a mouth, a stomach, and a sense of identity can create, consume, and appreciate amazing food. The food one creates is a work of art that pleases all the senses. Food creates a stairway between the mind and the soul by way of every sense. This is why food can change us. This is why we can create food.

Stuff It Cornbread Stuffing



         And let's not forget my father's contribution. The man would rather hang himself from the debilitated rafters of our ranch tract house than be poised over the stove or by the oven on a holiday, but he will be the first to get in the car and run us some errands! A saving grace during any holiday season, Enrique sets on his horse in his Land Rover and picks up a sack of shiny oily coffee beans from Pete's Coffee and some fresh-baked artisan bread from the Mayfair Bakery. He loves making a fresh pot of coffee in the morning, slathering on some unsalted butter and quince paste on a piece of fresh crusty bread, and dunking it in his coffee. This is heaven for him in the morning, and John and I have taken a liking to coffee with bread, Manchego cheese and quince paste in the evening for a light, less sugary dessert. It’s an enchanting grouping of savory, yeasty, fruity, and awakening flavors that melt together.


              Crazy Elsa, who is comprised of equal portions of crass and sweet, is another one of the few Argentinians that can be found in the San Francisco Bay Area. She makes and caters killer desserts out of her little home kitchen. You can't tell if she is having the time of her life making her mouth-watering alfajores, pionono rolls, and merengues, or if she has decided that "today is the day" she will kill her husband, take his money, and open her own bakery in North Beach. In any case, she is an artist in our eyes, and she will be providing us with a quince paste-filled PASTA FLORA.

The foods that are created by a family are, above all, fail-proof. Our family has countless faults, shabby tempers, busy schedules, emotional ebbs and flows. But we have fail-proofing down to a science. And it can most especially be found in our food. The flavors we create will never fail us.

Ode to the Tiny Mouse at Caltrain Station in Mountain View

Fumbling jumping
anything to assure
                           he makes it all the way to the other end of the bricks
to the opposite edge of the platform
before the reinforced rubber sole of a Clarke's shoe
crushes his spine
and closes his eyes


The headlight groans yellow
                                         comes closer
as his thread-like feet scuttle
                                          in the wrong direction
Train whistle blowing
leather loafers skipping
and fragile brown mouse, which way should you scuttle?


A leap off the bricks, he opts for the planter
seems like his wits did serve him for the better.

Memory Stretches: Lovers in Chiang Mai

If you were to ask me how to get from Chiang Mai’s old city gate to the Doi Suthep Temple, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I vaguely remember some of the stores around the train station, but I don’t even remember which end of the city it was on. Despite having studied the city’s history, having rented an apartment there, and having run all my daily errands there for nearly four months, I can’t remember another time in my life when I was preposterously disoriented and had such a difficult time realizing how the map coincided with the alleys and landmarks that lay before me. The city is hardly expansive, and it doesn’t possess those intimidations that are common of metro areas, like raging traffic, garbage and clutter, or marketplaces with feverish tempers. Thus, there was really no excuse for me not to teach myself some directions. Chiang Mai was a thick humid jungle of snaking streets, intense dripping foliage, and flowering golden temples all encrusted with glorious sun-catching gems and a scattering of monks in melon-colored robes. I felt awed and lost. Nearly every day I spent there, I felt drunk from the passionately warm skies, and chilly from the mysterious unknown that lurked behind every cluttered storefront, every smoking food stall, every bamboo thicket, every cluster of shacks and barrels. 

 The most vivid recollections are of the rituals John and I created within our new Northern Thai city. I fondly remember Raintree, a restaurant two blocks away from our apartment, located on a boulevard with a littering of expat shops and restaurants. It was clean, sunny, and luxuriously air-conditioned; truly a refuge for our swollen feet and drenched, overheated bodies. More often for lunch, John and I would step in, our pale faces glistening amidst the tanner, dryer locals, legs exhausted from a mid-morning session of exploration and hopping around the bustling city, either in sawngthaew, a pickup truck with a covered bed and secured park benches for commuters, or on foot. The first thing we would request was two cold filtered glasses of water: na’am. While we waited for the water to filter, I would reach for the Lonely Planet guide book and plunk it down on the table between us.

“You want to look up the next route of exploration?”

“I thought we could make our way toward the market, and end up around there tonight.”

“We have enough time to skip town, see the outskirts, and be back in time for the night market, Mariana. Let’s think of something for the afternoon.

“Okay.” I turned the book on its spine and it automatically fell open to a two-page spread of a map of Chiang Mai. I ran my finger down the page, trying to spot a highway leading out of the city.

“We’ll take a sawngthaew.”

“Should we write this down?”

“We don’t need to write it down.”

“Okay.” I laughed at myself and turned to the glossary at the back of the book to look up the correct pronunciation of “sawngtheaw.” (Saong-TAO).

Water was shortly followed by two dainty bowls of steamed brown rice, fluffy and grainy, comforting to our unsettled stomachs. Ever since the first big monsoon storm, we had been waking up with pains in our abdomens and complaining of occasional dizziness. On a good day, John could avoid diarrhea and I would stay clear of nausea by remembering to shield my face from the exhaust while riding in the backs of the sawngthaews.

 With our tummies feeling fortified, John and I grazed on heaping plates of Pad Thai noodles, fried fish skins, and Panang Curry with a side of extra bamboo shoots. John would squeeze a lime wedge over a side portion of bean sprouts and call it his salad. We were leery of lettuces and greens. Even though Raintree’s dining room was crisp and tidy, the view of the kitchen on the way to the outdoor squatter displayed the unspeakable horror that is an unregulated multi-use back alley, with one use being food preparation.

That night, we stayed under the tents of the night market for as long as possible. Globs of water began pouring from the sky with shouts of thunder and strikes of lightening. Brocade blouses and silk scarves danced in the stalls as the winds cut through the warm night air. The monsoon rains were invading the city again, crushing a merchant’s tent full of souvenir trinkets and forcing the food stalls with chicken feet and fried noodle purses to shut down. We began our decent home once we realized the rain was not going to cease. The locals shrouded themselves in plastic ponchos and shower caps. We didn’t even have an umbrella. When we were blocks from our apartment, the road had transformed into a brown river, clutching dirt and debris from the ground and hauling it toward our legs. The water was up to our knees and I tried to keep the handbag I had bought for my grandmother out of the water as we passed the yak pasture next to our building.

“Oh my god the yaks! I hope they’re okay!” I yelled out.

John assured me, “They are probably inside, I’m sure they’re fine,” he said, clutching my slippery wet hand in his.

If only we had known that the yaks’ feces was clinging to our toes as we passed the field and that the next morning, we would be wading back down the same boulevard toward the hospital, clinging to each other, squinting for visibility through the rains, waiting to be diagnosed with a dysentery, thanks to the monsoon.

Perhaps that is why I never really learned to read a map of Chiang Mai.

Memory stretches. Angelica's Apartment

Angelica's Apartment

           I never saw mothballs or cabbage in Angelica’s apartment, but that didn't keep the pink walls of her Buenos Aires living room from having the ferocious sting of naphthalene and fetid cabbage. It was that same smell that made me wince as I opened the armoire in Angelica's spare bedroom, where I was to tuck away my clothes and valuables; the smell was strange and unsettling when you're in Argentina and you're ten. The smell intensifies behind the doors of closed cabinets and hutches when there are no visitors to entertain. It smells funny here and the people move too fast, and everyone already knows me but I don't know them at all, is what I had already planned to tell my mother when she called from California.

“La hora del té, nena.”


          I was called to teatime, five o’clock. The ting of the cathedral bells sounded wildly and a cloak of cloud matter rose off the river to shroud the lower districts; La Boca, San Telmo, the neglected port. We had a layered view of the city's tops from Angelica's twelfth-story window. My eyes narrowed toward the florid details of baroque buildings, the crowning adornments of the basilicas, tried hard to avoid the water tanks, peeling paint, and collected garbage on the rooftops below me, because they had an unfamiliar ugliness and frailty. I couldn’t control my eyes when they spotted cats or pigeons on the rooftops, though. Those were familiar and sort of suburban to me, to a degree.


“Nena, tomá tu asiento.”


        Angelica wanted me to take my seat. She hardly knew me and already she was giving me instructions, telling me what to do. Her assuredness in knowing me made her wobbly and gargled voice all the more repugnant to me when I'd here her call for me. My grandmother, whom Angelica always introduced as her best friend, encouraged her and chided me when I buried myself in a book, pretending not to here anything. I had always felt my grandmother was my closest confidant, after all, she had moved to California to raise me and be with me. Now there was this Angelica woman, crowning the head of her French mahogany dining table, smacking down on a crustless soggy sandwich.


       Angelica had assigned me a teacup, a plain one, albeit a very fine porcelain one. All her teacups were dainty and little. I watched her pour the honey-colored liquid into my cup, my grandmother’s cup, then hers. Her cup was the prettiest, the most ornate. Her thick fingers and yellowed nails looked insulting, vulgar as she wrapped them around the milky, almost transparent cup. Yelí’s face was round and meaty, her eyes watery, her hair a wild and fiery red. She claimed to be a model when she was twenty, but then a headboard fell on her face and broke the bridge of her nose, so she became a doctor. "I was a female Alexander Fleming," she said over the honking of taxis that rose into the room through the brittle windows. And she sighed after saying this, to emphasize how obvious this statement should be.


She told good stories. One time, she seduced Juan Peron while Evita (she called her Eva) was out of town. Peron fell in love with Yeli at first glance. There was another story was about her theories on why she thought my godmother was working for the CIA. "Why do you think she travels to North America all the time? Who do you think is paying for all her expenses, especially when she doesn't have a husband to support her?"


I have lived a life of fortune and well-deserved notability. She said this with her unperished confidence, her surprisingly dainty hands dancing across her sagging bust as she gargled. The reality was that she had survived a lot of misfortunes and ....


(Husband- alcoholic, tried to go out window)


      One sunny winter's day, while sitting under blankets and watching pigeons dance on the sill, Yelí announced it was almost time for tea. "Tea is a staple and a pastime" as she opened the hutch that housed her finer china. "All ladies should know how to set a table for teatime." I figured she wanted me to watch her set the table, so I got up and shyly watched her arrange the china in a neat pattern. Then she went back to the hutch and paused with a cup and saucer in her hand.


"This one is really old," she said, "it's an antique."


The ivory cup had a curly handle, almost in the shape of a leaf, and scalloped edges, on the top and the bottom where the cup met its matching saucer. Tiny dots of gold leaf, almost Braille-like, studded the tops of green leaves and faint white blossoms. The scalloped saucer had looked like an alabaster lily pad, and bore an important-looking seal on the bottom. The cup and saucer reminded me of a fairy, or a distinguished garden, like nothing that existed in the California suburb where I had grown up. I suddenly realized that it was the age of the pieces in her apartment, the pieces of her life that had weathered the trial of time, that mesmerized me about Yelí’s apartment the most. Her teacups can still evoke this feeling, I’m certain.


"Do you like this one?"


It's my favorite, I thought.


"If you hold it up to the light, you can see that it is of the finest quality," and she held the teacup sideways in front of her smoggy window, showing me how the light filtered through the delicate porcelain.


"I will wash this one for you and put it in a box for you to take home to North America. This one will be yours but you have to promise me that you will serve tea in your house when you grow up to be a fine lady."


I blushed and smiled and kissed her soft flabby cheek, and sat at her grand table for tea.


     In the summers when I clean out my hutch, or when my grandmother comes over for tea and I’m setting the patterns down on the table, I pick up the cup , follow the glistening gold leaf dots with me fingers, and it them up to my nose to see if they still smell like mothballs, or cabbage.

Recessions

Yesterday, I saw a man fall from the sky.

Actually he was in one of those expandable compartments that are attached to the tops of utility trucks, usually they're operated by utilities companies or city maintenance- I don't know what they're called. They look like a cross between a crane and carnival ride.

Anyway, it was quite startling to see this man fall with such force and at such a rapid pace. I was driving by on a narrow expressway from work to my home, and if I had stopped, the Audi convertible behind me would have surely run straight into my protruding bike rack.

But I wonder if anyone stopped. Not to gawk, but to help or inform Pacific Gas and Electric that they have an injured worker (and hopefully only injured).

Watching the man fall from above made me think about all the men and women that must be falling from the sky in recent months. Falling, not soaring, not coasting, maybe even diving from a high place in life to a murky bottom, or through a tunnel with no bottom at all- just an uncontrolled plummet. A fall from secured funds, a fall from guarantees and certainties, a dive from trust and faith in our government, our health care system, our financial sector and the men and women running all the mentioned entities.

Seconds after watching the man fall from the sky, I brake steadily at a stop light and start to eye all the cars and people stopped around me. The young man in the black Audi stopped alongside my gurgling Volvo station wagon turns to look at me; he bares no smile, no calm, and almost looks angry. I'm not nice enough to smile at him, I figure he would respond the same way as the engineers and programmers with whom I work; an expression that exhibits a blend of supremacy, boredom, and mercilessness.


These days, Saudis come here to visit their sons, the great princes and heirs, at Stanford University. They blow thousands of dollars at Bloomingdale's and thousands more on meals at four-star restaurants along Santa Cruz Avenue. Foreigners have moved here and pay for their multi million-dollar properties, Teslas, and Maserattis in cash. Where does this leave us? The people spilling out of volvos and running to the next Target clearance while trying to charge our tuitions to our credit cards?

Expatriate. 2nd ed.

Expatriate

I had two decades of sun-streaked hair pouring on my shoulders
twirling legs and a hand on the hip of my swimsuit.

I had a blue cat that turned to the beat of somnambulism
and stared for years past the iron railing of the embassy.

I once had a city balcony full of basil
and a grand army of buttons and thimbles
that shot at the boxcars made of spice tins.

Before that, I had a temperate sky and a front yard
that grew weeds of familiarity
and there was a story that trembled under my skin
preparing to play itself out in the form of sunburns.

During these times, possessing percipience was optional.
I went about in a casual way, swallowing street corners with my scooter

unaware

of the requisite learning process for fencing in worries.

Wasting my time with heavy doses of calm
in a house that my mother dressed with tenderness
Resting my head on a pillow that spoke to me
but kept secrets about my mind's calamity.

And in San Francisco's July I began to spot ruined faces
in the fog
I watched gilded hands rob frustrated ghosts
of their innate rhyme, their honest reasoning, pragmatism.

Now in a warm Winter like this one, companions fly into town
but flee swiftly with mental pox, fiscal leprosy,
educated orphans stealing cigars and sucking on patience,
and I feebly hope to remain content with the faithful tones of my elders.

I once had four sacraments
a guardian angel
and several photographs
hidden between the pages of Love (in the Time of Cholera)

I had a lover with a full head of dark hair
and each strand embodied the boldness of living freely
and the disasters caused by undiagnosed loneliness.

I tried imitating my mother
making sure I knew the meaning of breadth and bracelets
but she was busy cultivating strands of gray hair.

I reminded my father to look in the mirror and see me
but he forgot, his wrinkles turned into dry creeks.
All of this happened so long ago. Last year, and five years before that

and then just yesterday
he asked me where I was going
he said he wanted to meet me there.
I assured him I wouldn't be fooled by Utopist hallucinations
and that all those ideas I once had, that he once had
would not get packed up and sold to someone else

Then I wished for many forks to form alongside him
and to guide him over fragile Californian coastlines
while I watch from above
and close a parachute.