When I woke up in the morning, it was the day before Thanksgiving. I was sprawled on the big brown bed in the guest room at my brother’s house; the day before I’d flown from Hong Kong to Tokyo to Los Angeles to Dallas. I’d been greeted at the airport by my sister Carla and my step-dad Sidney, and after sleeping deeply for one night I drove my still-unsold car to my mom’s house; yellow leaves swirled behind me in the wind and the air was warm.
Because I planned to spend time with my family, and because more and more family members arrived every few hours as Thanksgiving approached, I was unable to attend an informal “young alumni” reunion that my high school was hosting that night at a fancy boutique hotel in downtown Dallas called The Stoneleigh. (I’d looked forward to reconnecting with friends from school, but The Stoneleigh was where my ex-girlfriend Anne and I had spent a week together in a room with long striped curtains along the walls and redbacked flower patterns on the carpet and long decorative pillows on the bed and a television set that spun a full circle to face either side of the room, so I felt a wounded relief – a coward’s relief – as I realized that I could justifiably avoid the reunion.)
In other words, instead of the emotional rise-and-fall of my revisited past, – of reinvented schoolmates and a girlfriend’s ghost – I chose the emotional rise-and-fall of family.
Following my Mom and Sidney’s wedding in June, Thanksgiving was our newly combined family’s first holiday together. And after snacking on hard cheeses and translucently thin crackers, we sat at two tables in the dining room, one of which was decorated with living leaves and red berries and candles and one of which was decorated with green gourds and living leaves and red berries and candles and white star-shaped flowers. We ate sweet or crumbly or moist or leafy or crunchy or spicy foods, and I sat with my sisters and my brother and with three of my four step-brothers and my mom and my step-dad and my grandparents and my uncle and my aunt and my cousin who is moving from Phoenix to Austin and who brought his daughter who he hadn’t seen for eighteen months before that week.
The mosaic of our faces and personalities was different, but the meal and the silver-helmet football game on television and the nap that followed were all familiar. I enjoyed myself and enjoyed the food, although I wished – as I almost always do when I’m with my family – that I was more able to be patient and magnanimous. (Then and afterward I thought of Pierre in War and Peace who honors his friend and wins his “undying devotion simply by drawing out the best aspects of his soul and admiring them,” and wished that I might become more like that: observant and kind and socially nurturing.)
…The day after Thanksgiving, I went to a party. It was in a neighborhood called Highland Park and at the house where my friends Colin and Nicole grew up. I saw classmates from high school there and saw some of their parents; I ate vegan pizza and chocolate-rolled pecans and stood next to a big untouched pile of chopped fruit with a beer in my hand; I saw a painting by Salvador Dalí inconspicuously hung in the living room; and before the night ended my friends’ teeth were wine-stained a funny impermanent purple-grey and we all sunk on soft couches and laughed.
In the days that followed, I watched pink and orange sunsets sprawl across the leafy suburban sky under a high and perfect crescent moon; I went to a movie at the Northpark Mall and before leaving I stood next to a valet parking attendant in a blue jacket with a long silver bar double-piercing the top of her ear and saw that on the stand where she organized keys there was a big curling paperback book titled Oil and Gas Law; I saw birdflocks rise in hundred-edged silhouettes from overhead wires and saw the slow fading glow of autumnal sunlight; I bought cereal and soymilk; I finished reading War and Peace and read Bright Lights, Big City and started reading Blood Meridian; I ate dinner at my grandparents’ house and had white and brown and orange carrot cake for dessert and my grandmother told me that after earning her master’s degree in psychology she had only one official client – a young autistic girl – but that she believes she uses her degree every day; I acknowledged that it feels good to be alone, but that prolonged solitude makes me feel less centered and more psychologically skittish; I drank spiced beers at a holiday beer tasting party; I thought about a girl I used to love; I drove and looked up at leafless trees skittering their black outlines in the air and watched clean white and yellow trains pass beyond the blinking lights and long painted moving beams that blocked the road; I cried three times into my hands; I woke up late in the day and watched the twinkle of light and shadow through drawn curtains as leaves fluttered in the outside breeze and then drew the curtains in the afternoon so the sun could pierce the window’s squares and blind me with golden-moted rays of light; I jogged; I ate Ethiopian food; I sat with a brilliant and inspiring woman named Ashley and drank hot mint tea while she ate oatmeal and I saw an old cowboy with dark brown skin wearing a tan flat-brimmed hat and a black vest and a purple shirt; and at night I looked up from my brother’s front yard in the darkness at the eggish gibbous moon and imagined that it – the moon and my relationship to it – was nothing at all, and had become only a remnant in memory of an otherwise forgotten and now alien fiction.
And I started thinking seriously and practically about the future.
…Planning the few months that will immediately follow the end of this year is at once stressful and soothing. And it sometimes feels like a denial of the present moment; although my conversations about continued charity work and international travel and about writing and publishing are meaningful and exciting and necessary, I also feel compelled to understand – or at least ponder – the things that have just happened, and that continue to happen now.
In a small and immediate context, I feel compelled to process the impact of leaving India and the ennui that has predictably followed. And in a larger and more general context, I feel compelled to consider my attitude toward the changes in my life and understand the way the past informs the present, and the way my memories seem to appear and disappear, and how forgotten or suppressed truths become accessible only as I become ready.
But that readiness is nothing I can consciously control. Instead I just try to relax; I try to meet change with receptivity, and revisit the past with care.
For instance: Last week I went to the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University. Since I’d been there once or twice as a teenager, I’d intended to return many times – but perhaps because I wasn’t ready – I’d never actually gone back.
And when I walked up the museum’s clopping wooden stairs and passed Murillo’s Immaculate Conception, I was dumbstruck and moved by the stars above Mary’s head and the putti at her feet and the corners of the crescent moon curving beneath her like a holy animal’s horns. And after I passed the nude metal statues of The Three Graces, I approached the painted images that had been so-long stored in my unconscious memory: a dwarf standing among pomegranates and lapdogs and birds, an enigmatic lonely woman on a Parisian balcony, a dead green Christ, a barely recognizable abstract black figure floating against a bright orange background, and all the saints. (One was kneeling and one was looking up and one was martyred with arrows and one was sprawled angular white and bearded and his naked body was covered with only a skirt of woven straw and he lay with rosary beads and a skull.)
And I saw Goya’s small black haunting Yard with Madmen which I’d unconsciously remembered many times in the last year when I stood in the stinking shadow of a high terrible wall in Prem Dan where men would piss and scream and writhe and smear their ugly food against their lips.
The paintings showed me some part of the mysterious visual vocabulary of my spiritual and creative subconscious, and showed me some part of what lingers in my memory and what fades away. And I started to understand that I am slowly allowing myself to remember and feel what has happened in both the distant and recent past; I am slowly reconnecting to the images and sensations from which I have felt so strangely disconnected.
…But as I explored my psyche and the many mirrors of my nightmares and dreams, I knew I had to temper my introspection with social action. I knew I couldn’t study my soul forever.
So I volunteered to distribute toys.
For five days I reported to a warehouse in West Dallas with high ceilings and giant orange shelves. The warehouse – the Salvation Army Christmas and Disaster Relief Center – is filled with donated toys every year, and every year thousands of impoverished Dallas families come to the center to receive gifts.
One day I sorted toys into carts and taped little tears in flimsy plastic gift-bags; the work felt mundane and overwhelming at times, but I easily returned in thought to familiar reflections on purpose and devotion, and rediscovered the joy of simple occupation, and remembered Mother Teresa’s mantra of “small things with great love”.
In the days that followed, I shifted to troubleshooting and to checking in “clients” and to actually handing over big bags of toys. And although I found value in all the things I did, it was meeting the people I was serving and giving them their gifts that moved me most. (When one woman saw a big stuffed yellow bee in her toy bag, she exclaimed that her infant son had asked for exactly that; then she smiled with deep sincerity and infectious delight and said her son – his name was Alvin – was going to be very happy.)
It wasn’t until I saw more than one person shed tears of overwhelmed gratitude that I remembered why I’d been drawn to service then and in the past; it wasn’t until I witnessed the humanity of others – and honored their experience of pain and hope and redemption – that I witnessed the convergence of my own memories and moods: I felt connected to others and free to feel new doubts and old pains; I felt sadness and joy when I thought of the past, and felt fear and brave hope when I thought of the future. And I acknowledged the mysterious but knowable truth of what I had given, and what I had received.
