And listen to KMHD, 89.1 fm, on Friday, August 6 at 1:30 pm for a live, on-air performance with bassist Dan Schulte

I’m washing up the dinner dishes. I have the flu. This morning I woke up to a soaking couch and the living room hardwoods slick with water. It is spring in Portland. It is raining hard. My roof is apparently leaking. I taught today, but before that had a meeting with Oregon Humanities who called me to talk about war and memory and how we tell stories, why we do and why we must. After teaching, the kids and I sat in yet another doctor’s waiting room for Clarke’s head. It’s half an hour past our appointment and we are still waiting. Clarke looks at me, “Mama, let’s just go. They can’t do anything any way.” I just look at him. “It’s been nine years,” he says. “It’s not going to get any better.”

“You don’t know that,” I say.

“Yes I do,” he says.

I stand up. Soph puts down her People magazine. We walk out. I tell him we are not giving up, that is not an option. Pain and hearing loss are at an all-time low. We have to boost his immunity, he has another infection. We have to deal with his resistance to antibiotics. I’m done with surgeons. Done. I call his acupuncturist, whom we haven’t seen in two years. Needles and herbal concoctions are not Clarke’s most favorite combination. I tell Clarke I’ll pay him to do this, a dollar a visit. He smiles and says okay.

So I am thinking about a lot of things, washing the dishes after dinner. Soph is in the tub, and Clarke still needs a ramp. I tell him to look at the house with ramp-maker eyes, I tell him I’ll help when I finish. I put in another load of laundry and go to check the bucket in the living room. Across the floor are CDs, books, tupperware. A cutting board is the main ramp, propped up with a book and plastic lids. The path leading to the ramp is a road of CD cases butted up against one another: Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Paul Bley, Ani di Franco, Wilco, Smashing Pumpkins…Clarke has his remote control car poised on Tom Jobim, the first CD of the path, he pushes the lever and the car sails across the music, angles up the ramp, and plows straight into a stack of blocks topped with Steve Kuhn, Radiohead and The Arcade Fire CDs. They go flying. “Yes!” he shouts.

I wish I could look at the world with bridge-maker eyes, see how to build something to the people I miss, the things I’ve lost.

Tonight at dinner Soph calls a family meeting. She started something called the BLDCB, which stands for the Breakfast-Lunch-Dinner-Communication-Book and if anyone has something to talk about they write it in this little spiral notebook. Then we talk about it and end the discussion by going around the table and reading a poem, selected from a stack Soph keeps on the floor of the kitchen nook where we eat. This was all her deal, I had nothing to do with any of this. So tonight she presents an old empty tea canister in which she’s placed folded up pieces of paper. She instructs us to close our eyes and draw three. It turns out they’re new jobs for the week. I draw Harold (the guinea pig) feeding chores, setting the table, and Job Judge, which apparently is quality control…there is also the Clutter Helper (picking up around the house), food preparation (I had to modify that one a bit, considering no one knows how to use a knife or the gas stove but I…), and Ruby (the cat) and Clara (the other guinea pig) chores.

The poem book Sophie hands me tonight is one of Billy Collins’s. I read a poem called Love. About a girl, a boy, a cello, and a train. If only it were that simple, I think. Or maybe it is, and I just don’t get it. Clarke reads Dog Love from this kids’ pet poems book. He takes every opportunity possible to remind me on my promise to get them a dog, finally, one year from this June. Soph chooses Paul Merchant, and his Greek translations of Yannis Ritsos, and straight-faced reads a piece that contains the words “A cigarette. And the moon on your breast.” At which point she and Clarke double over in howling laughter that lasts for 7 minutes and results in spilled yogurt and rice on the floor.

I do not care. I do not care about the roof. I do not care about the flu. I do not care about surgeons.

In our little family we play a game called, “I love you more than…,” and depending on the mood, the stakes vary. One day it could be, “I love you more than green tea,” at which point Soph will ask me, bagged or that expensive loose stuff you buy…again, my answer depends on my mood. Tonight while tucking them in Clarke trumps my “I love you more than chocolate,” with “I love you more than everything.” Soph says she loves me more than the world.

In the world of our house, tonight at dinner, we noticed that the tiniest corn and tomato starts popped up out of the soil. Their little pots are on the kitchen table and the kids have been diligently spraying them with water. In maybe two weeks we’ll transplant them outside. In the summer we like to sit on our back patio and eat from our garden. 


My son does not believe his pain will ever go away. This is what he believes. And I can’t change that. Can’t seem to fix it. And every time I think about that, some piece of me somewhere cracks a little. He’s right, nine years is a long time. I don’t know what I believe in anymore. About medicine, about love, about war, about the weather. All I do know, is that when my kid reads Greek poetry and erupts into laughter, or when the other one builds a ramp with my cutting board and CDs, that ramp extends straight to all the parts in me that hurt. And in those moments, quite literally nothing else matters except that exact map-pin point of geography where I’m standing, except that exacting light threaded through the needle to all the pieces of ourselves we sew together and patch over and over and over and over.

There is a jar of homemade plum jelly on my kitchen counter. It was left on my porch last week by another friend, along with someone else who left homemade tomato sauce, along with someone else who brought over homemade split pea soup and a bag of farm produce.

Minh and his wife come to my house today, to practice speaking English. As a thank you, they bring me Vietnamese food, salad rolls with fresh basil and spiced tofu, spring rolls, beef filled something, chunky sweet and sour peanut sauce….it reminds me of when I used to go to the home of a refugee from Ukraine and help her with her English. Her family had raised honey bees back home. On one visit she gave me her last jar of honey, it had journeyed from one continent and one life, to another.

Minh and his wife and I talk about our kids, they go out back to look at my tomato plants. We have tea, and talk about how both their fathers spent years—one for 13, the other for 8—in a post-war Communist prison camp. They tell me about not enough food for anyone, in or out of the prison walls. Minh’s wife would boil peanuts, and then carry them to the stadium in Saigon on sporting event days, scale the wall, the top of which was lined with coils of barbed wire, and sell the peanuts for money to buy food so she and her family could live.

They tell me that their fathers were allowed visitors once every two months, and they would try to bring food, as their fathers were starving. I say I am sorry for what they have all been through. She looks at me, “But they survived.”

It is time for me to pick up my kids at school. I open my freezer and hand them a jar of tomato sauce I made a week ago. I reach for the plum jelly my friend made, and I think he’d like me to give it to them, his hand extended through mine, to this family who lost their daughter to brain cancer, who lost their country, and so much more, and who continue surviving.

And we continue surviving because we feed each other, through words and food and by looking at each other while we tell our stories. My son wrote a report about himself for school, it’s here on my desk in front of me. “My eyes change colors and I have jet black hair,” he writes. My eyes change color, too, all this past week, they must have. Sitting in the kitchen at my table this afternoon, it is difficult to hear these stories. At times I have to fight back the tears, I do not want them to think they’ve made me cry. It is difficult to sit at my desk and work on this anthology and read so many poems about lost limbs and lost dreams and lost lives. Wars don’t ever end. They just don’t.

And in the past 24 hours, in addition to the above: took a walk with a friend whose 87 year old father in law just moved in; found out a friend’s marriage is ending; learned another friend’s 7 year old son may be facing open heart surgery; my mother surfaced and called me from a pay phone, having trouble putting words together, methadoned out, but in her way, a piece of her still trying to connect; my great aunt Charlotte died today and my 95 year old grandmother is sad…and the house is a mess and the laundry needs to be done and I still haven’t finished my syllabus for the class I’m teaching starting Monday, and things are tanking sideways with this huge freelance project… The wars don’t ever end, they just don’t.

But yesterday morning a friend sat in my yellow kitchen while I chopped onions and tomatoes for this roasted vegetable recipe she told me about, “You don’t have enough basil,” she says. “Add more olive oil,” she says. “Go to the store and get garlic.” And last night I sat on the floor at my friend’s place, and we listened to Soundgarden and talked about music until midnight, and I don’t know, it was fun. And tonight for dinner I ate my thank you gift Vietnamese food. And this morning the sky was grey, like my son’s eyes, when they’re not blue, when they’re filled with the reflection of all that’s right in front of him, the glint of the world, if held up to the light, to be seen.

It’s ironic, really. Timing, and all. Irony twists time so all you thought you understood is upside down or simply wrong, and despite, days spill into a life…I wrote that lyric about ten years ago. The irony is in the call from my dad two days ago. My cousin Michelle has passed away. She is the first of my generation, this gaggle of Rian cousins. My dad keeps saying, “It could be one of you girls,” meaning me or my sister, Annie. He keeps saying, “My brother. I can’t imagine.”

And the memories come flooding back, like tethered light, hidden at night on the other side of the world, waiting for dawn or a reason to re-appear, make visible the landscape of the day. I hang up the phone and suddenly I am like nine, swimming with Michelle in her family’s pool in her backyard. Michelle was one of the coolest cousins. She had sort of a deep voice, even then, kind of raspy. sometimes she even smoked. She made me laugh. She was blond, and beautiful, and seemed worldly to me–a gawky, awkward, too tall, too skinny, glasses wearing, book worm who never seemed to know the right things to say, so most of the time I pretty much just kept my mouth shut. And watched my cousins. and wondered how they, like Michelle, could seem so at ease with who they were. Or at least, that’s how it seemed to me back then.

There is this tune called Why Are We Afraid. It’s a Previn song, written for this obscure movie from 1959. I have the sheet music, found in my mother’s piano bench. She used to practice it. And I’m making a record for her in a couple months, of tunes I grew up with, that she loved. She’ll never hear this record, I don’t think, and even if she did, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t matter, but it’s for her, nonetheless. I noticed one day about a month ago when I was looking at this tune that there was a lyricist’s name listed next to Previn’s. But there were no lyrics on the sheet music. And none to be found online. And none in the Stan Getz library at Berklee School of Music. And none at the USC Cinematic Arts Library.

And on the day I find out Michelle has died I get an email from one of my musical singer heroes. Somehow my request has wound its way to him, without me knowing it. I think it’s because of my new best friend at the USC Cinematic Arts Library. But this person–we’re talking Lincoln Center, Broadway. Big. And he’s emailing me, gawky still, former glasses wearing, never knowing the right things to say, me. And he’s found this tune for me. And I don’t know, it’s ironic. timing and all.

The tune goes, “Why are we afraid? Afraid to face the way we feel. We could have it made, instead of asking, is it real? Who’s to say if the way we love is wrong, love today, and tomorrow sing a sorry song. Why are we afraid? Afraid to act the way we choose. Win or lose, long as the dues are paid, why are we afraid?”

It’s ironic. Timing and all. There is no time to be afraid. There simply is no time to be afraid.

A voice student is set to arrive on my doorstep any minute. And after that, my friend Jessie and I are going to the ballet. A voice student this morning brought me 15 pounds of fall-picked apples and tomorrow morning the house will smell like cinnamon and nutmeg and all the things that go into apple pie. My writing students, the papers they turned in, their first assignment…they wrote about losing parents, losing faith, losing hope, wrestling with psychological disorders, being abused…it is interesting, most of them, somehow went to some hard place. I don’t know why, I am reaching back trying to remember what I said or how I set it up, or if it’s just me that for some reason people go to that place when they talk to me. It happens more often than not. I am grateful for the sharing on that level, that kind of humanness, even if I don’t understand it. But these kids, in their first week of school at the college level, were not afraid. They wrote. They carefully typed up and formatted in MLA style like I requested. They turned their papers in on time. They trusted me with their stories.

And every time I start to cry about Michelle I have a kid who needs a meal or help with homework or to be tucked into bed or read to, a guinea pig cage to clean, a cat to feed, a student’s story to read or song to hear, a pie to bake, a ballet to watch, a moon to see. It is a life, that somehow continued on past those summers in Seattle, playing with the cousins, one of whom is now gone. But my life continues on, for the next hour I suppose, days I hope, years if I’m lucky. I think it’s luck. Today, at least, it is. Pure, unafraid, luck.

*

Cynthia, my other neighbor, stops me as I’m getting into my car one day, and hands me a gift bag with pretty tissue paper. Inside is fancy loose-leaf tea and a diffuser. She knows I love tea. And she knows my heart just got beaten up pretty badly as I’ve been moping about mowing the lawn and watering my flowers. This one had potential. Such music I felt in this one. And she knows that. “Just wanted to cheer you up a little,” she says.

*

Clarke has had his first CT scan. He is 18 months old. And the hospital sent us home too early. And he is starting to react to the anesthesia. His torso is burning and fever spiking a degree a minute, while his extremities are ice cold and turning brownish blue. The pediatrician on-call says it will be quicker to drive him to ER, since we live near a hospital, than to wait for an ambulance. They said stop whatever you’re doing and go now. Cynthia is out working in her yard. I simply hand her my three year old, Sophie. It is the single worst day of my life. Every single piece of life as I knew it, every part of me, changed on that day. And I am not sure where Sophie will eat or sleep, but I do know she will be fine. And she is. She stays the night at Linda and Ken’s, Linda takes a picture for me of Soph and Natalie, their daughter, leaning against each other having fallen asleep on the couch watching a movie, Sophie wearing a pair of Natalie’s jammies.

*

Many years ago, the week of my divorce, I am unloading groceries from the back of my car. The toddlers are still in their car seats so I can keep them contained while I run the bags up to the porch. I am still learning how to do this solo, and in what steps to manage the most mundane of activities so the kids are safe, the chores get finished, and I don’t go crazy. But today, I just signed papers. And today sucks. And I start to cry and stop unloading the groceries and am just standing there. And Linda must have seen me from her window across the street, cause a few moments later I feel this hand on my back and she says, “Take the kids in, let me handle the groceries.” So together we get the kids and bags inside. She will not let me unpack them, she does it herself.

*

My favorite summer days are when a gaggle of neighbor kids are in the backyard with the hose and popsicles, and the guinea pigs, Clara Sasha and Nutcracker Prince Harold are brought outside in their little corrals, and neighbor girl Nora brings over her guinea pig, Taxi Buttons, and my neighbor Kathleen and I talk over the fence about our lives. We really do this. And we often send a kid over for a cup of sugar, too. Seriously. And someday I think Nora and Clarkie will get married.

*

In the winter Kathleen and I switch from talking over our backyard fence, to talking over the laurel hedge that divides our two front porches. Early December, every single year, she stands and giggles while I string, re-string, cuss, climb down the ladder, climb up the ladder, re-string, cuss some more, and attempt to hang my Christmas lights. I have labeled the lights which strings go on which part of the house, and which ends go into which outlets and which ends need the extension cord. And every single year I screw it up and have to start all over, and it’s always raining and cold, and Kathleen always laughs at me, and it always makes me smile at myself and stop cussing.

*

There is such a thing called $5 runs. This is where you go running very fast and up very big hills for exactly one hour because it is the only thing that allows sleep at night and that keeps one’s back from locking up. And it is the only hour of the day that is one’s own for a certain life chapter. And it is the only hour of the day when one can think. And every major decision for a decade happens on these runs. And every major problem gets figured out on these runs. And it becomes sacred. It becomes survival. And so you have amassed a critically necessary army of neighbor girls to whom you pay $5 for a run and they come watch the babies. And these girls are named Brittany, Alice, Emily, Lauren, and Eileen. And I seriously could not have made it through a very long decade without them. The funny thing is, by the end of the decade they had become $10 runs.

*

There are many more intersecting stories and days and conversations on the map of this block. And they’re all like the ones above. I’ve received advice, soup, hugs, laughs, homemade bread, borrowed garden tools, you name it, from Connie, Dennis, David and the other Tom, Julie and the other David, Amy, Christine… I think my friend Eric is right about setting up luck, that a good life is not passive, it is built. And how we build it is a choice, a series of choices for who to be, who to surround ourselves with, where to place value and time and effort, and how to mold the shape and course of the days we have. And that includes the geography of home.

But I have also come to believe that occasionally we land where we land despite ourselves, or any intention. And sometimes it’s bad—we’re born into the middle of a war zone. And sometimes it’s a quiet block in NE Portland where we’re all just helping each other live our lives. And whether we call it luck, or grace, or random alignment of circumstance, all I know is that on the darkest of nights over the past 11 years, when I give up on sleep, usually around 3 am, I wrap a blanket around myself and go sit on my front porch. And that’s where I land when I’m happy, when I’m sad, when everything seems either hopeless or possible. And often there are stars. And the windows of the houses lining this block are dark. But I know in a few hours one by one, the lights will click on, the coffee will be made, the children will pad out into the kitchen, and slowly the pace of day will unwind, and by about 7:45 most of us are in our driveways buckling in the kids and racing off to school or work. And we repeat this circle of day over and over. And this is one of the few things I happen to know, that I can count on. And the topography fills in around our hearts as we lose, maintain, find. And the simplest acts—Cynthia taking a moment to water my flowers, too, after she finishes hers—becomes the curve of the earth, the part that holds everything together, that keeps the ocean from spilling over the side, and turns landscape into story into home into the rest of our life.

I drive as fast as I can. It takes goddamn 30 minutes to find a store, some business with a phone. My phone still does not have coverage. We run in, I tell the woman behind the counter I need to use her phone, there’s been a terrible accident, an ambulance is needed. She does not pause from what she is doing behind the counter. She says, “There’s a pay phone down the road.”

“Pay phone?” I say. “Pay phone?” I am not a violent person. I seriously want to jump over the counter and slap her, shake her, get in her face. But there is an image of another face, overlayed, one I couldn’t see clearly, on the asphalt. Plus, there is no time for such smallness. There is never time for such smallness.

We find the pay phone, we call 911. I consider turning around and going back, but know we’d never reach the scene, traffic at this point, backed up for miles and miles. So we continue toward home. I ask the kids how all this makes them feel.

Clarke says, “Today is sad. I feel bad for the guy running.”

“Why do you think he was running?“ I ask.

“Because he loved the person on the ground,” Clarke says, “And to get away from the badness.”

”Cause there’s nowhere to go,” says Sophie. “We run when we’re sad.”

On the drive between the accident and the store I had explained to the kids what was happening, that while this was a horrible situation, all these strangers, people who’d never before met, had pulled over, and everyone was doing what they could to help. That hopefully a doctor would be in one of the cars in the line of waiting cars and do what they could; that the man in front of us was directing traffic; and that our job was to call the ambulance because that was something we could do.

We continue the conversation as the road winds its way out of the mountains. “What do you think about the lady in the store?” I ask.

“That lady’s poor,” says Clarke.

“Poor in what way?” I ask

“Poor in goodness,” he says.

“She is missing her heart,” says Sophie.

“What I saw today,” continues Clarke, “is that there are different kinds of people in the world. People who stop to help, and people who make us use a pay phone when there’s a phone on the counter.”

I continue looking straight ahead but the landscape is blurred through my welled-up eyes. There is no way to anticipate grief, the little whitecaps when one realizes their eight and ten year old see, understand, and accept, the shadows of human nature. It is a lesson that took navigating the open seas of uncharted loss for me to learn, as an adult.

I turn on the music again. The title track of this record, Inside Out, repeats a pattern about halfway through, stacking and re-stacking progressions and rhythms like days on a calendar, like years in a life, so you’re hooked, so your ears begin to trust the song. And then, just when you begin to feel lost in the familiar, it all changes you. In the liner notes, Jarrett writes, “Inside Out means… bringing pure out from the inside, at the spur of the moment.“ Perhaps kids are inside out adults, and somehow we gradually re-envelope ourselves the older we get, the more what we live through accumulates. Then we spend the rest of our hours, the rest of the song, working to peel it all back again, to get to some sort of simple understanding of who we are and what we want while we can.

It’s ten pm, August 1. It is a day on the calendar of our lives. We are home. I’ve just pulled sourdough out of the oven, and rhubarb sauce is cooling on the stove. The kids don’t want to go to bed. So we sit at the table and slather butter to melt into the hunks of bread. I dip mine in the rhubarb. We eat half the damn loaf. Blueberries, too. There are blueberries. I’m still playing the same record, brought in from my car, and now over and over in the kitchen, re-stacking the progressions of my kids words, trying to lock the rhythm of their conversation into my head, their mannerisms, gestures, who they are, trying to see what they see, so I can begin to trust this song, get lost in some kind of familiar, even if for just a little while, even if for just a little while.

It seems to all billow to me now, the older I get. What was once concrete, now thinning to threads, the winds picking up with each passing year, so that the fabric of my memories flaps even harder despite the grip of my clothespin fingers on the wires of my days. When my sister and I would come home from school, my mother would put on Sergio Mendes, Miles Davis, Paul Desmond while we ate our graham crackers. There was this one tune I remember, and sometimes these days I call it at a gig cause I feel like singing it because it reminds me of my mom, another long goodbye, and because sometimes remembering is the only kind of evidence that counts. But on the nights I do this the other musicians always look at me with confused faces because no one seems to know this tune, but it’s ironic because it’s the one I have never forgotten, The Trouble With Hello Is Goodbye. Mendes and Shirley Bassey seem to be close to the only folks to ever have recorded the song. The rest of us have recorded it with our lives.

I was in the mountains last week. And it was torrentially raining. And I decided to go on a beloved trail run up the mountain, ascending from the Wallowa River. The trail was about one and half feet wide, relentlessly riddled with rocks, a sheer drop on one side. It felt sort of stupid, but at the same time not; it also forced utter centering, breathing, careful footing, alone, on a mountain, in the rain, listening to the river roar below, cutting above the wind, complete concentration and presence within each single moment so I didn’t careen off the side. In a life filled with what has felt particularly in recent years like many missteps and false starts and lack of vision and wrong choices on my part, I needed a simple couple hours to get it right in some way. Perhaps that was some of the lure for Bachar that kept him pushing himself and the sport he loved to the oneness he sought, grasping a rock or toehold and hanging on the side of hard, cold earth just because he could.

And maybe that’s as close to answers as we get. Or perhaps even looking for answers in the first place is like trying to pin linear synchronicity on history and its human alignment in the first place. The last time I saw Carlita was at the hospital two days before she died. She’d been sleeping every other time I visited, but on this evening she was drowsily awake. I remember, still remember, how it struck me as purely Carlita that even as she was letting go, she was noticing. “You have a sundress on,” she said, her mouth dry, the word coming out haltingly, barely audible, even as I’m leaning down close enough to her face to feel her breath. “It must be nice outside.”

And it was. Sunny, bright, hot. It was a day, like any other summer day, sky above, earth below, birds in between.

A few days ago, a friend of mine and I had a discussion about what holds more truth, believing in faith, or in luck. Faith, he said, implies the work is done in spite of oneself, by our submission, our life is our life is our path. Surrender. Luck requires action, setting oneself up to receive luck should we be so lucky to have it grace our paths. Both require belief, yes; but luck requires a pragmatic alignment of forward steps taken, in spite of the path, in spite of the seeming course. To reconcile for oneself. To not surrender, under any circumstances. To believe in luck, is to squarely face the opposite truth, to know it very well may not appear. And to be okay with that, anyway, and to continue on with the life’s work of finding oneself anyway.

Piano notes string melody above a blanket of synthesizer on track three, ivory keys divided like days by black, and night brings shadow to the living room. I have not gotten up to turn on the light, the sky is dim and my son’s body has become a twilight outline. I can still see his fingers tracing sound. He seems to know every movement, every transition, every fade, every build, of every track. I wonder how many times he has listened to this music.

Without any set up, I break the quiet and softly ask what he thinks has been the lesson in all his medical issues, in his tumor, his chronic pain, his tinnitus. I have learned over the years that he usually has the answers I do not. He keeps his eyes closed, takes awhile to answer, and then simply says, big and little. I ask him what he means. He says, little things don’t matter, we have to save our energy for the big things that come along, like my head. He is eight.

I don’t answer, we keep listening to the music. A moment later he says, you know mama, it’s okay. I sort of think all this has been okay. What do you mean, I ask. Well, he says, this is who I am. Kids at school, they think I’m cool cause doctors cut into my head, and it makes me different from everyone else. And even if the doctors could take out the parts they couldn’t get last time, I would say no. I want it in there, cause it’s me. And it’s how I hear, even the tinnitus, even the headaches, it’s me.

When he was four, he created a whole kingdom in his head that has since been built on and on, an elaborate story about bullfrogs bringing his headaches, and tiny bats only he could see sweeping in and taking them away. Giant ‘thunderbeasts’ cheered for the bullfrogs, and the chief chameleon would always determine which side had won each battle. Sometimes the bats couldn’t help with his headaches because they had other work to do, such as making the oceans not flood. The bats would scrunch together their eyes really tightly and turn into the biggest bats in the world and hold back the ocean with their wings. He would start talking, usually while tucking him into bed, and I’d grab a notepad and pen and write while he told his stories.

At least at one point in each of our lives there is a dramatic pause, that point where nothing makes sense, or at least is not clear, and there is a rest in the score while we look around for the coda, some kind of permission or symbol or reason to gather our notes, to then throw them up to fly like dots of crows against a familiar sky, quietly and forward, toward bats and bullfrogs, toward descending nights, quiet, peanut butter cookies, neighborhood burrito joints, and eight year olds who already know who they are, who don’t wince at needles, or at their mother’s questions, or at the choice to believe in luck.

We write for about 20 minutes. Then I ask if anyone wants to share their poem. Frank is from Taiwan. He tells us happiness is only in moments of forgetting. He tells us that his wife died of Lou Gehrig’s disease. He would wheel her chair to the park near their apartment and they would watch the children running, spinning on the merry go round, listen to them laughing, and they would forget she was dying, they would forget she was in a wheelchair, there was so much of the world at the park to absorb, in those moments it was bigger than them. In her final months when he couldn’t take her that far, he’d wheel her out on their balcony and they could still see parts of the park, still hear the laughing and shrieking floating across the treetops.

Minh says happiness is in our dreams and hopes, but not necessarily in reality. He says it took him 32 years to finally successfully leave Vietnam. He tells of how difficult life was in Vietnam, difficult enough to spend an entire lifetime trying to leave. He has been in the United States two years. He says he was happier 32 years ago than now, when he had the dream of leaving, something to fight for, to believe in, some kind of bigger truth to be within. With a dream the past is leave-able, forgettable. Without a dream, we are where we are.

Perhaps standing here, on this soil, in this moment, is happiness, just the kind that is hard fought, moored in a harbor of memory and regret and loss, hidden.

Minh’s daughter recently won an essay contest, and was flown to the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs for an awards ceremony. This prompts me to ask how many children Minh has. He says four. Then repeats four, three living. I ask what happened. He says one of his children died of a brain tumor 13 years ago. She was 10 years old. My son has had a mysterious mass in his head since birth, it has been an 8 year, unresolved journey, and when I hear things like this my heart rattles about a bit in my chest.

He tells me of a doctor in St. Louis, an immigrant himself who at one time worked in the orchards in the German countryside, picking and carrying baskets full of fruit down swept dirt rows, until he became a doctor and landed in St. Louis. He is retired now, but throughout his medical practice he did what he could for third world children. Minh’s daughter was flown to the US, where this doctor performed multiple surgeries. After one of the surgeries the child slipped into a coma and never woke up.

Minh and his wife named their youngest child after this doctor. Minh chuckles a bit and says, my Vietnamese baby with an American name. Minh tells me, that this doctor has never recovered, has had an even more difficult time processing the loss than Minh himself.

This is not a happy story. None of these are happy stories. But for some reason on this night the continents and countries merge, Taiwan, Germany, Vietnam, America, and sitting in Portland on some plastic chair sized for a grade schooler, as the sky darkens outside on some random Wednesday night, our eyes are welled up, and for a moment it is quiet and still, and we’re all looking down at the words we just wrote, thinking about the words we just told and heard. Minh is concerned about my son, I tell him he is all right, it’s all okay, because in this moment, it sort of is.

And maybe this is what happiness looks like. Maybe it is all of this, in the forgetting, in the dreams, in the trying to save each other from tumors or tears, maybe happiness is sad, maybe we accept that, because we have to, because our stories, they are all the same, and maybe the comfort in that is bigger than us, as big as the horizon line leading to some distant land mass, and as small as a tire swing in a park with some kid hanging onto the chain, twirling, never to know the notes of her laughter reached an apartment balcony and wrote the kind of music that replays to memory in one man’s mind for the entire rest of his life.