July 5, 2008 We have been traveling for five days and now find ourselves in San Francisco. Yesterday we went to a Giants game and after several hours of seemingly harmless clouded sunshine, I now sport bright red arms and shoulders that radiate a temperature that my body was previously unaware of. I like San Francisco. I like the city in the way that you like a stranger for the possibility of what they could be if only you were to get to know them and learn a few of their secrets. It wouldn't need to be a long friendship only passionate.
There are only fragments of memories that cling like residue to my perception of childhood. Somehow San Francisco has always been more prevalent then the rest of those cameo appearances of towns and cities. It wasn't the happiest of times, it wasn't the worst, but maybe it was the most interesting.
I was seven-years-old and my mother, father, brother and I lived on Pine street near Nob Hill edging Chinatown. I remember the yellowish brick that adorned the exterior and seemed to blend in perfectly with the sidewalk and sky at the same time. We lived on the third floor. My father's best friend lived one floor above us and habitually left the playboy channel on which ensued my brother and I having to cover our eyes or turn our heads as we walked through the apartment for a visit. There was only one occasion that I remember betraying that rule and to my surprise and great confusion I glimpsed a cartoon. John Boyd, I coveted his name as if he were just as much my friend as my father's. To me he wasn't a man but a pillar of consistency amongst constant change. Across from the apartment building on the corner was a small market where my father would buy scratch-its and let my brother and I scrape away their gummy surfaces in search of a prize that held no real significance to us as children. I wonder if my father thought it was lucky to let us scratch the tickets, I wonder if he ever won? Outside of the little market, which was in perfect view from our living room window, was a drug dealer. I knew this at the age of seven, and could repeat it to anyone interested or not, but the meaning of that person was completely abstract to me. He may as well have been selling coffee cups or pocket wrenches, it was all meaningless to a child. To my parents it was a marker, we lived in a bad neighborhood. The four of us lived in a one bedroom apartment. My father slept in the living room on the couch, not because of the divorce two years earlier but because my father always slept on the couch. I attribute it to his old world protectiveness. My mother, brother and I slept on an air mattress in the bedroom, whether it existed or not I don't remember any other furniture. We were poor but only today can I recognize that. There is no poor for a seven-year-old child. There is starving, which we were not; there is unhappy, which we were not.
Louie was more that just a brother, he was my best friend. Our bond grew even stronger learning that we were different from all of the other kids at school. It was hard to figure out why we were so isolated seeing as all the kids looked different from each other: Chinese, Japanese, and African in heritage. I know that it was difficult, uncomfortable and unusual to be the only white girl at a school of several hundred, but if it would not have been for one bully in particular I don't think I would have minded the circumstances so much. Lakeesha tormented me regularly, following me to the bathroom at recess, tripping me, teasing me incessantly. I hated her but found no satisfaction the afternoon she fell out of the back of the school bus while it was stopped at the top of a hill. She got a concussion and cried horribly before the medics arrived. I felt bad for her and even though I wasn't the one who pulled that emergency exit handle, I felt my anger was responsible for the event.
Throughout the teasing at school, the tiny apartment and the drug dealer across the street I have clear happy memories of that time. Memories of the Chinese new year feeding the dragon, learning Kung Fu in the basement of our building, and ribbon dancing. Mostly I remember the four of us being together. That was the last time we all lived together, divorced or not it meant a great deal to my brother and I, in 1987 and today.
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