parade

On the Saturday after the new year, Chinatown hosts an annual parade. The list of sponsors and participants is bewildering, encompassing airlines and high school spirit teams, local dojos and multinational banks. McDonald's boasts a block-long procession of Asian teenagers, twirling the famous yellow-on-red flag in unison. Visa sponsors a large float, with a spinning umbrella plastered with pictures of vacations and credit cards. A few high-school marching bands high-step down the streets behind them. Several have settled on instrumental renditions of "Eye of the Tiger", in honor of the zodiac year.

A Chinese father leads his young daughter to the front of the crowds standing on the curb. The Visa float is throwing candy towards them. She scampers up to a few pieces that have landed in front of her, grabs and shoves them into the pockets in the front of her dress. She shows her winnings to her father and offers him a wrapped peppermint. He pops it into his mouth, does something complicated with his teeth and tongue, and pushes the wrapper out with his lips. He grins and pats his daughter on the head. She is chewing on a candy of her own, laughing.

A few paper-mâché warriors are striding toward them now, standing about a head above the crowds on the curbs. "Stay here," her father mouths and runs towards the them, gripping his camera. He kneels to get a better shot, and she loses sight of him in the crowd.

Black-shirted organizers scatter Chinese firecrackers on the pavement in front of them. The red cylinders tumble and pop, throwing off sparks and small clouds of smoke. A stray flap rolls towards the girl, bounces off her fingers. She draws her hand away, startled but unharmed. The firecrackers' heat dissipates quickly in the night.

A few rockets stream into the sky -- real American fireworks with real explosions, she thinks, big and bright and glorious. The faces of the people around her are illuminated briefly, flashes of red scarves and golden hair, ivory white smiles. The parade is over now, she knows, and the crowd is moving past her, disappearing into buses and subways and parking garages. She sits on the curb and watches the smoke drift into nonexistence, waiting patiently for her father to return.

untouched

On nights that I didn't want to see my uncle after work, I would walk to a small stand near my office. The middle-aged Korean man who worked the night shift there never seemed to age a single day nor learn a single word of English; he had been there for as long as anyone could remember and probably owned the stand himself. The seats were wooden stools pulled up to a bar that extended from his stand. I'd order the only thing on the menu -- a large bowl of noodles in broth -- and take out a book from the library or the used-book store across the street. When I finished, I'd exchange a nod with the owner and leave five or six dollars on the table.

I met Danielle for the first time on one of these nights. It was a pretty cold night for October, and the stand offered little enough shelter from the wind. I ducked under the tin roof and took a seat at the counter, noticed the tall brunette warming her hands over her bowl. Another bowl cooled on the counter next to her. She seemed reluctant to eat. I paged through my book without much interest. When I eventually fished out the last of my noodles and got up to leave, she was still picking disconsolately at her bowl, alone.

it goes on and on and on and on

When I was young, I spent about a year living in a small town in the hills of California. I had planned to live in the sprawling city on the bay, from which a train ran daily to the suburb where I worked. But a few months after I began work, an older uncle living in the hills came down with a fever which turned with time into a slow, helpless forgetfulness. What could I do? A family must care for its own; for the time being, responsibility for his care fell to me.

So instead of riding the train, every day I drove sixty-three miles from the small town where I lived with him to the suburb where I worked. My uncle's aging automobile had a charm and elegance of its own, though it burned gasoline at an astonishing rate -- nearly a quarter of a tank per round trip.

I usually left work hours after sunset, the road stretched endlessly out ahead of me. At night, the white ramps and bridges are mute marvels, deserted and bewildering in size. I traveled past miles and miles of streetlights, their orange glow blotting out the stars. (Astrology is a lost art for good reason.) But the empty highway has a way of blanking my mind, and soon I was home. I felt a kind of sympathetic embarrassment for the sixty-three miles of desert between my office and my town in the hills -- to be surmounted so easily, first by a gang of overgrown monkeys and their bridges and roads, then by any old fool in an automobile!

It occurred to me much later that distance is only a kind of metaphor for something we knew once and have now forgotten. A symbol, maybe, for something like wonder, something like eternity. There is no word for it, of course -- the purpose of metaphor is to explain those things for which there are no exact words. But this is an age ruled by literal men, who know that a highway overpass is not an astonishing, blasphemous chain binding the earth away from the sky, but simply the most efficient way to cross from point A to point B with the minimum expenditure of time and treasure.