Heartcrossings

Enjoyed reading this Neruda poem which felt perfectly timed after the holidays and a lot of cooking. Though no tuna large or small featured in the menu, reading this brought to mind picking up the last duck in the store a few days ago. I wanted to do something different but not overly complicated and a roasted duck fits the bill very nicely.  Nothing like a majestic tuna surrounded by humble vegetables, it sat alone in the freezer, cleaned, dressed and shrink-wrapped in plastic. Its identity on remained on the label. In China it had been an interesting experience to see roasted ducks lined up in restaurant windows, every detail preserved. The presentation was quite specific as well. For an outsider to the culture, it rendered the duck with lifelike qualities that were impossible to overlook - I never once wanted to try it.  The frozen grocery store duck elevated the dinner at home that one evening. It came out of the oven looking how I have come to expect the dish to look. To...

When primary content disappears, there is no longer a source of truth. There is no way to validate the citations or references to that content have come to the right conclusions. It used to be that we were concerned about being on the internet for ever but now if you care to remain visible, you have the opposite concern - that of disappearing without notice . Somehow, there came to be an expectation that content was forever if it was digital, that the rules that applied to content in pre-digital times no longer applied The loss of content is not a new phenomenon. It’s endemic to human societies, marked as we are by an ephemerality that can be hard to contextualize from a distance. For every Shakespeare, hundreds of other playwrights lived, wrote, and died, and we remember neither their names nor their words. (There is also, of course, a Marlowe, for the girlies who know.) For every Dickens, uncountable penny dreadfuls on cheap newsprint didn’t withstand the test of decades. For every i...

I met up with a friend from a long time ago over the holidays. She is a few years younger than me and grew up in a similar social and cultural milieu. Sitting in my living room drinking tea and chatting about times left far behind, a home we can no longer recognize felt comforting. Her immediate family has immigrated a long time ago so there is really nothing left to return to except for the desire to help her child understand his roots. We got talking about things that were common in our childhood but don't exist anymore - the things that such roots are made of. We did not miss these things in our lives but when recalled they seemed to be imbued with special meaning. The shampoo that used to be advertised in every commercial break on national television. The model with her long and lustrous hair that the said shampoo had everything to do with or so we thought. Adjusted for age, M still has beautiful hair of her youth when I first met her, she was definitely shampoo model grade bac...

Right after Christmas in 2004, I was making a big move halfway across the country with my parents and J. What little stuff I had was packed in boxes and shipped with UPS to my employer's office. They would forward the boxes on once I had found my apartment. J's belongings were all in the trunk of my car and we we had enough supplies to survive the first few days in an empty apartment until my boxes arrived. I can't recall how mattresses had fit into car but somehow we must have done that so there would be something to sleep on. The boxes did arrive in a few days and we were able to make a home out of the apartment. This was before I started writing this blog so I have no specific accounting of those days. J had not fussed during the long road-trip. She napped through the most of it. We stopped by for meals at local restaurants along the way and that was a bit of entertainment. There was a lot of snow all the way until our destination. A memory that I recalled over the holid...