Opening Day at Candlestick Park was always the best day of the year, a time of new hope, fresh grass, hot dogs, long rides on buses, towering fly balls, hot sun and cold, cold wind.
Ramblings while on a slow suburban death.
Category: Short Stories
I saw, I wrote.
It is God’s honest truth that I have never wanted to serve on a jury, despite being told on numerous occasions that this would count as one of the greatest acts of citizenry. After my first experience of being questioned as a potential juror in a murder trial, there seemed nothing more frightening than handing down a guilty verdict to an assailant that kept glaring at me with his one good eye. Have these trial attorneys ever seen any Lifetime movies during “witness protection week”?
Among my mother’s group of Japanese friends, she was the only one that learned how to drive. I would sit the back seat of the driver’s training vehicle as she maneuvered around San Francisco to the exasperation of her instructor.
Somewhere between Dublin and Tokyo, Morning Star School in San Francisco began beating its own cultural drum.
We used to celebrate the Japanese observation of Girl’s Day (Hina Matsuri) at home by putting up an old wooden doll display and eating special omanju (rice cakes). My mother treated this day with such delicacy, and we were never to jump around the doll display or behave in our usual rambunctious manner that might cause the dolls to topple. My sister and I were seasoned at house destruction, setting crayons to wall covering with ease or sliding down three long flights of stairs in our brownstone flat while riding a child’s bathtub, ending our trip by crashing into the front door.
Bertha, the craziest friend from my childhood, once introduced me to Tanya, the only child of a very wealthy lawyer couple that had an apartment in a Pacific Heights skyrise and a home in Atherton. Tanya walked around clutching Bay City Roller albums and had sewn plaid onto the bottom hems of her flooded semi-bell bottom pants. She was the first autograph chaser of my acquaintance, and her quiet demeanor hid a rather crafty streak that plotted out times, dates and ways to meet her favorite teeny-bopper idol. Tanya was also skilled at meeting other teenaged autograph hunters, and they would plot their strategy to recognize and corner a famous person. Her plans, of course, always worked.
Postcards on Facebook
Published by Anna Pirhana on March 14, 2014Remember those old posters about footprints in the sand? I hated it back then, and I have equal contempt for those postcard images on Facebook.