In the year of my early youth when my father was charged with bringing me to the Emporium rooftop for an afternoon of Santa photos and Christmas rides, he bundled me into a series of sweaters and scarves so tight that I began to sweat while riding the 5 Fulton.
My sister and I spent many of our Thanksgivings with Patricia’s family in a light purple flat deep in San Francisco’s Richmond district.
The ritual post-Thanksgiving writing exercise required that Sister Linda’s third grade class detail the holiday events.
The team of my youth, the San Francisco Giants, has just won its third World Series in five years. It is an amazing accomplishment, though it is still difficult for me to fully comprehend.
On a humid summer afternoon in Kawasaki, my mother sailed into the house, leaving her heeled sandals in the doorway before stepping up onto the dark and polished wooden floor of the kitchen.
The recent weekend George Washington High School reunion picnic brought out memories of my own time wandering those dark and cold class hallways, where I snuck away from my last class to sit on the football bleachers.
The second record I ever bought was a song by Glady Knight and the Pips. I wanted to have that soulful voice of hers along with my own set of backup singers.
I bid adieu to the cold toilet seats in the bleachers, the outfield fence, the malted vendor of long ago that used to wear eyeglass frames without lenses and the one night my friends wandered the parking lot, lost inside a thick fog.
Daddy teaches me how to to eliminate Public Enemy No. 1
Published by Anna Pirhana on November 3, 2014My father forced me to go to the polling booth with him every year. Dressed in my Catholic school uniform, I would walk with him to the local polling station, where he would force me to stay in my spot as he moved towards a heavy apparatus that looked like an essential part of Frankenstein’s laboratory.