The following is a poem I wrote in 2006.  I believe it was about myself and some of the people I've met who do not live at a rushed pace.  I forgot I even wrote it.  I've lost most of my earlier writing.  Alas, I hope you like it.


A Person Walking Slowly

A hobbled hopscotch over crossword steps
And puzzles are left blank-
Distracted models, motors-
His is picking up a slack pace
Around soft earth and scoffed touch
Clutching those thin handles doubled up
Like dumbbells weighing his steps downward
Dressing up darkness with pressed smiles
Quickly he peaks, speaks in hushed tones: gentle man
"Stare not too enviously at this calloused castle world"
This guarded thing that trounces
That cheapens precious thoughts, meaning...
That leaps out at your dear eyes, wheezing...
Don't hold your breath its not you whom it smothers
You are just a person
Walking slowly, pausing 
Watching the shadows thin and stretch
The length of never-
Being there means being everywhere
Your every all in a slight pinch of
Todays look like yesterdays.
To us all it does, in some way or another,
This man has senseless care
Slowly walking through the thicket path.

Shoe soles brush the floor, whirling cars buzz by, as I lumber my way up to the Coffee Bean on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Westwood.  I spot the restroom entrance in the corner with a sign posted limiting access to patrons.  The line at the counter is short.  The person ahead of me asks only to make change.  I order my coffee and step to the fixing area.  A middle-aged man, short of stature and broad-shouldered, with black thinning hair, stirs his drink hypnotically.  I start to wait behind him as I tend to do when someone is ahead of me at these stations.  I decide not to defer to him and find that there is ample room on the other side of the station to sweeten my coffee.  The man continues to stir, to obsessively tinker with his treat as if an alchemist shaping gold.  I reach over for the half-and-half, my arm stretching across the man’s line of sight.  He is absolutely transfixed on his drink.  I move deftly and economically while the man stands in place, gesturing, and twisting his arms like a maestro to make his drink perfect. 

I find a table outside.  A good sized crowd has turned out, and the place is abuzz with chatter.  The patrons press closely together, chattering, crackling, and going back-and-forth as the din engulfs my ears.  Thumbing through Anthony Shadid’s book, straining over the metal table, sitting quietly with my eyes fixed straight ahead.  Two observations take up my attention—the lady seated ahead of me and the gentleman speaking to the side of me.  I glance but do not want to stare.  I listen to his incessant, intelligent pleadings but can only make out some of his words and not the ideas behind these words.  I mostly remember that he alone in his group was speaking.  He spoke without pause, not even to take a breath or to invite others into his conversation.  

I walk into the swallowing crowd.  It makes me.  I wander.  I become one of the hundreds.  I walk across the street.  This may be my last walk through a crowd and I'm not lost.  I walk until I'm gathering up steam with purpose.  Somewhere in my future I will be walking somewhere.  Not today.  Today, I'm among the multitudes of people trying to enjoy the afternoon Sun.  It shines on all of us for the day until the universe hides us from its glaring majesty.  We are all at it's mercy - the crowd, the sun, the society we live in.  The crowd is sometimes the only permissible rule.  Our bodies fall in line behind one person or one object or anything.  We are all bodies when we are in a crowd.  Nothing special.  I walk away with the crowd whispering into my ear.

The neighbors were cold and then they were warm.  My childhood home can be described in this way, pure and simply.  Our first next-door neighbors were outright mean and adversarial.  They moved.  The family who moved in their stead happened to be the warmest people I’ve ever encountered.  It felt like a home away from home.  The home that I yearned for.  A taste of comfort in a swallowing abyss of nonsense as Los Angeles struggled through the 1980s.  There was food, comfort, togetherness, fellowship, laughter—these necessary elements of human existence—that were found here in abundance.  This family struggled and discussed their struggles to me allowing me into their world that I didn’t quite understand.  There were parties, fights, and jokes flying around like a speeding jet.  I couldn’t quite keep up with the news in my neighborhood—Pinney Street, Arleta, California.

After I moved to Palm Desert in 1993, I used to drop by the neighborhood—sometimes as planned, and sometimes unannounced because I wanted to know how these people were doing.  I cared about all of these people.  I felt like I was a part of their community.  I think I’ve gone through every shade of emotion trying to connect with this community.  And there seemed to always be a birthday being celebrated, or a story to be rehashed, or a show or game to be watched in unison with a bunch of people who grew up in and around this neighborhood.  I used to watch with amusement as the older generations commiserated as if they were still High School buddies, living out their glory days.  They experienced their youth in the 1970s and 1980s when most my generation was busy being born.  I always wonder what unresolved issue was being brought up way past the point of time that it actually happened and mattered.

The last time I went back to the neighborhood was in 2007 before turning 28 years old.  At that point, I decided I must leave the neighborhood altogether—everyone, every character, every love interest, every unresolved question—everything.  I was enrolled at UCLA for Graduate School hoping to make it through a stressful time in my life.  In Graduate School, I learned that the world will not wait for you to finish up and start something of yourself—Bill Collectors need to make a living too, and my empty pockets were their business.  I learned how to persevere, locking myself up almost literally in the Young Research Library trying to make sense of my classes and the books I was reading.  I stopped working and was lucky to have my dad invite me back into his home.

To describe Pinney Street is to describe the playground for every impression I first had in this world.  I remember the two trees in front of our house that would be our favorite hangout and hiding place for Hide-and-Go-Seek.  We used to etch our nicknames on their poor trunks.  We used to watch the leaves fall and grow as the seasons progressed.  It seemed like my Dad would have his latest bad investment parked out in front of these trees in perpetuity.  There was always something odd growing out of my house like the great outdoors.  There was just so much going on.  The neighborhood would smile at us if they knew we made it.  Our end of Pinney Street was a small cul-de-sac filled with quiet, sleepy homes.  We played Baseball out front on summer afternoons, launching Tennis Balls into people’s pools until we ran out for the day.  I fashioned myself to be a crafty pitcher without any hitting prowess.  I was never a great athlete because I’m uncoordinated and become easily lost in my mind.  Pinney Street will always exist in my heart.

I see myself there, quietly folding my arms, standing outside.  It was never too cold but the memories seem icy cool.  I walked through the passages, askew and wandering, leading to the schoolyard.  Our school was located in a redbrick Korean church building in Van Nuys across from the courthouse.  Although I can only slightly remember specific school lessons, I remember vividly the schoolyard—the pouring of students onto the asphalt, the complete lack of grass, the conversations that reached fever-pitch, the nudging into lines that impatiently stirred as we readied for classes to begin.  

The rooms were ghostly and empty, dank and eerie.  There were four stories in the main building and the higher you traveled and went, the scarier it felt, the more ominous and lonely the hallways and rooms felt.  Are all others’ childhood memories flecked with these images of haunted places? Was my fear—my being afraid of the dark and of ghost stories—mirrored onto the rooms and halls of this school building? On the occasions that I would be left alone upstairs, I remember sprinting away with goose bumps crawling all over my skin, running to the masses in the schoolyard.  This is ironic for me: there aren’t too many times in my life that I would find solace in being surrounded by crowds of people.  

And yet my childhood never seemed lonely - nothing close to the loneliness I would feel as an adult.  There were my three brothers constantly pushing some thing or some idea into my face.  My sister would talk to me when I was there even though she too was fed up with being helpless and wondering what life was.  The classroom sizes were tiny.  We all knew each other.  Everything was the exact same until we hit puberty and became more and more familiar with our neighborhoods and the neighborhood kids they harbored.  There was a window that would open up to the school yard which was actually a barren parking lot with basketball rims.  Here, we would get our sugary snacks if we had some change.  The older kids manned the registers.  I never thought I would get that old.  Time is an endless riddle to me.  I'm thirty-four years old but I still feel like that boy who would never hit his teenage years only to be here asking father time to be a bit gentler.  These stairs still harbor frightful, lonesome chills.

The backyard patio was a gorgeous site for a barbecue.  Several generations sit around a table talking by the grill off to the side.  Children play with animated glee as the older child broods over a video game, but seeming happy to be there nonetheless.  In that instance, I knew that these people would become very familiar and I would get used to these faces.  Nothing in that moment will change.  Future scenes will also be similar except the time and circumstances will change.  The scene was the same but the only thing that changed was tinkered together by perspective—in how that evening was perceived by each participant.  The thing about family is that they’re a lifetime commitment.  What stands out to me in that event was that everything in that moment was moving—conversations, food, lips, feet, kids playing with frolic and ease.  Abigail and her twin sister born a couple months ago attended what most likely was their first barbecue.

Yesterday, I held baby Abigail.  Yesterday, I held baby Abigail and I felt like thirty four years of wonder, of fear, of chaos, of investigation were put to rest.  She held me as I held her—still to the disquiet, to the comings and goings, the constant change that has been haunting me for years.  I sometimes wish I could stay still with every easy routine, every simple care and thought and meal.  It’s like everything I’ve ever done has been interrupted constantly.  And I held baby Abigail and I was still like a domino standing.  All I could think of was how time flies but here I am still and Abigail will be a baby tomorrow and the next day until she too is running and conversing like the children around me.  Babies take time to grow, to be nurtured, and to be fully capable of taking on this world.  All parents can do is one day let go.

She felt like the softest fabric lost in the gentle wind.  My finger spanned her whole hand.  “One day you will be twirling people around those little fingers”, I think now, looking back at the occasion.  She was the size of two footballs and gushed out songs with her crying shouts.  She wanted everyone to know the size of her lungs, so tiny but so vocal.  She had her hair pointed up with a pink hair clip like her sister’s.  Her hair was soft and short.  One day her hair will be flowing and unkempt and teased and crimped and knotted into endless shapes.  Not today: her hair was short, soft and done up in a tiny point at the end of her head.  Her eyes will one day be able to discern all the activity around her but not today.  She’s being cared for.  Her brown eyes gently peer out at the world which awes in amazement.  She makes people melt into pools of wonder.  She will one day be her own, independent person but today the little world fits nicely into that little palm.