Rememory 1

A utopia is not a place but a process.
"It is a memory to be remembered, rendering knowledge and experience to shape a sweeter tomorrow."

I spent much of my childhood with my grandparents, who stayed with us through the long, sweltering summer and autumn months before flying back to Taiwan in the spring when only a short, distant phone call every few weeks would connect us. They would come with suitcase after suitcase full of toys and food and clothing that created a veritable heaven for my young eyes. The entire family room floor would be covered with old cloths, new possessions carefully laid out; my own private marketplace.

There were those long, rainy mornings in the winter I spent hiding the dust pan from my grandfather as he endeavored to sweep the kitchen floor, resulting in a merry chase that always ended in the broom closet. He always ate two whole almonds every morning for breakfast, and my brother and I would take a fiendish delight in hiding his nutcracker, usually in the utensil drawer, the last place he would look with a waggle of his bushy eyebrows. Long talks in Chinese with my grandmother where I devoured every word she said about growing up with honor and dignity. I would play with her blood pressure medication, sorting the little white pills into little white mountains and inventing stories for the little white pill with the brown speckles to journey through the snowy landscape.

I would always cry when they left, impossibly large suitcases filled again with American almonds cushioned in Wal-Mart shopping bags. I would follow the little procession out onto our front porch, watch as my father loaded my world for four months into our Previa, and wave manfully as they drove away. Then as we turned to make our way back into our now too-empty house no longer bursting at the seams with my grandfather's old newspapers, my grandmother's fourteen-dish dinners, when I turned to face again the ordinary, I would cry. I don't believe I cried because I missed them. I cried because the months ahead were so long, so empty with the uncertainty of whether or not I would ever see them again.

Now, I hardly understand a word they say over the distant telephone, and when the news is not good I sit and pretend that I am ignorant of the words babbled above my head. Now, I sit silently at the plastic-covered table in the kitchen with the dusty floor, head and heart full of memories that shape a brighter history.