I am so tired.

It’s a bit silly of me to be tired, since we’ve just emerged from a holiday weekend. Nevertheless, weary I am. I am about as tired as I was at the end of the day I went to visit Avi on the border with Lebanon, and had to take three buses to get there and three to get back, and was mistaken for a prostitute while I was at it (some of you know that story. Some of you do not. Parents, be assured that it was not because of anything I did, and I think I handled it quite well, considering.), and then I took a taxi back to my dorm room from the bus station and the cab driver, like all 50 year old men I met in Israel ever, wanted to talk and thought I was native and was so astonished and excited to find out that my Hebrew was late-learned that he simply had to invite me to go to the beach with him right then and there so we could chat some more and possibly swim. People, it was 9 or 10 at night. Israel is a skinny country, but Jerusalem is not a seaside town. So I said to him, in my best accent, “You have no idea how tired I am.”

Jerusalem is not a seaside town, but Singapore is a seasidecity and I cannot count the number of times I went to the beach at night when I was seventeeneighteenineteen pulled to the dark and the rush and slap of sea, looking for quiet to be alone or sometimes to be alone together, and did I tell you once Claire and Mei Ann and Tsui and I went skinnydipping there at night? I did not. I would not, if I were not so tired. It was Claire’s idea, of course. Afterwards we all agreed how wonderful and liberating it felt and it did feel like that to be sure, a little, but mostly it was very cold and we were laughing and afraid our clothes would be stolen and that the people over there would see us, but they didn’t. We didn’t even really see each other. One of us cut her foot on a rock going in. Is it weird that I can’t remember whether or not it was me?

Claire was with me when they traced that rose on my ankle, she held my hand though I did not need the comfort. It didn’t hurt. It buzzed and tingled like my skin was rising up to meet the needle and do you remember how Joni sang Hey Blue, songs are like tattoos/ you know I’ve been to sea before…?

I wasn’t going to tell about the tattoo, I had a plan to hide it forever (god knows I didn’t know how long that would really be) but that evening I realised I’d have to tell them or I’d never be able to go shoe-shopping with them again, and I needed someone to pay for my shoes, so I confessed. My mother cried and my father laughed; I like to tell that story.

Today is my parents’ 30th wedding anniversary. They are the most wonderful pair, I can’t even tell you how good they are together. I have no idea how they knew they would be, they are so different. But they are. Happy happy, you two.

Good night.

… how much I admire Evelyn D. at this moment.

Ross’s grandmother moved out of her house of 56 years today, at the age of 84, to start a new chapter in her life. She has left the rooms into which she moved as a newlywed, where her children grew up, and where she witnessed the marriages of both her daughter and her grandson.

She has taken with her most of her old furniture, several glass jars full of seashells, and a soul full of courage, grace, and a kickass sense of humor. Watch out, Jamaica Plain! My grandmother-in-law is about to rock your world.

My parents are religious people. I’m not sure if this is at all apparent from the writing that I’ve done here, but they are — they go to church every week, my mother reads from her Bible every day and hums hymns while she irons, they keep me in their prayers, and up until several months ago they also attended or hosted a weekly Bible study meeting where they and a group of old church-friends gathered to share testimony, discuss matters of theology, sing loudly in cracked voices, and munch on yummy things.

My mother has been a Christian (of the Methodist variety) ever since she was a little girl, when her mother converted from Buddhism — but my father’s faithfulness was more lately won, and it has evolved over the years. During my childhood I remember his interest in the church being almost exclusively intellectual — partly a function of his passion for ancient history and philosophy. He read the scriptures, but even more he drank deep from scholarly interpretations of the Bible. He didn’t use to take communion. He judged the quality of a sermon by the rigor of its argument, not by its emotional persuasiveness. He seemed to be pretty comfortable engaging in religious life as long as it was mostly a life of the mind. (Also, he loved music of all kinds and I think he enjoyed services as much for the opportunity to participate in choral singing as for anything else.)

Little by little his heart and soul began to be won over as well, and a few years ago he decided to get baptised. I’d say these days he’s as spiritual as my mother is, although they still manifest their beliefs in different ways. But he’s still my intellectual father, and he still approaches the text of his chosen faith with the eye of a critic and analyst. He is constantly asking questions and seeking out new answers. He loves theological debate. And while he does enjoy being on the winning side of an argument (where I get it from, I think), he is about as curious and open-minded a thinker as I know. It is one of the most wonderful things about him.

So I was a little perturbed this morning. I got an email from him telling me that he thinks perhaps (or rather, my very perceptive mother gently suggested to him that perhaps) one of the reasons a treasured family friend may have left their nearly 20 year old Bible study group is that my father had a habit of bringing up too many controversial topics for discussion. He prefaced this note with a reference to a book he’d recently heard about, entitled The Argumentative Indian. Nothing if not a sense of humor.

Well, I was a little perturbed but mostly proud. I love my argumentative Indian father, and I hope he knows he’s got himself an argumentative Indian-Chinese daughter to battle with whenever he wants.

Anne Fadiman — who, by the way, wrote a tremendous book that’s part medicine, part mystery, and part anthropology — I highly recommend it if you like nonfiction at all — has opined that there are two kinds of book lovers: courtly and carnal.

Courtly book lovers would lay their cloaks across a puddle to keep covers and pages pristine. They would as soon crack their own spines as that of a book’s. They own drawerfuls of bookmarks (no dog-ears!) and they thrill at the turn of a crisp new page and the smell of a freshly printed tome. They revere their books. Maybe they have rituals around reading — a certain spot, a certain time of day, a certain flavor of tea scenting the air. They catalog and classify and covet particular editions, particular covers.

Carnal book lovers — well. They are in it for the stuff that lives within the covers and the pages, and they don’t mind ravaging their books to get at it. They read in the bath and half their books are rippled with the evidence of it. They crack the spine as soon as they pick up a new book because how else are you going to get it open wide enough to devour what’s inside? They fold pages and scribble on them and bend paperbacks to fit in a jeans-pocket. Maybe they even love the most battered books the most.

I am a carnal book lover.

This isn’t so much a problem for book-longevity these days, when I am surrounded by so many books and sources of books that I hardly ever read a title more than once or twice. But when I was a girl, especially a very little girl, and I didn’t make it to the library quite as often as I wanted to, and I didn’t have the funds to buy as many books as I wanted (three million), I re-read books a lot.

A lot.

And it shows. I have a few books that survived from those days. This is what one of them looks like.

I must have read that thing 50 times. (As you can see I wasn’t a movie-cover snob then, and I still don’t really care about it that much, although I do of course prefer a thoughtfully-designed book.)

Anyway, all this is to say that this week Sarah found out that my old copy of Momo (possibly the greatest children’s fantasy ever written, and coincidentally by the same author as that poor paperback up there, too) was a little the worse for wear, and she very kindly up and sent me one whose cover is still attached. Without even telling me she was going to!

I love people who send me books out of the blue. It is one of the nicest things a person can do, and I don’t mind telling you I got a little teary-eyed when I saw that was what was in the package. So now, of course, I’m re-reading Momo — which I also read so many times I practically knew it by heart — and it’s very like revisiting an old dream. I can feel synapses firing in my brain, a complex ballet that hasn’t been danced in 15 years or so. My neurons know the steps, though: “Isn’t Guido going to tell the story of the goldfish and the whale, in a minute? Doesn’t the man in grey visit the barber in this chapter? Ah. Ah, yes.”

I am pretty sure Sarah is a courtly book lover — many librarians are — but we can still be friends. I just won’t show her what my new copy of Momo looks like after it’s gone through a couple of reading cycles in my hands.

*(in the pre-1937 sense of the word)

At lunch today A., who counts among her other fine qualities a talent for playwriting, tells us about a new piece that she’s been working on (it happens to be a satire of the industry we work in, the prospect of which I find delicious). Describing the play, she mentions that one of its main characters is a Mr. Miyagi-like figure, whose wise pronouncements sometimes sound like lunacy.

I stare blankly at her.

“Mr. Miyagi, you know. From The Karate Kid.”

Ohhhh. I LOVE The Karate Kid.

No really. I love the Karate Kid.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I first saw the film — but since it appears to have come out in 1984, when I was 5, and I’m pretty sure it would have taken several years for it to finally make its way onto one of the (three) channels we had on television in Singapore when I was growing up, I estimate that I was probably about 9.

So nine years old, then, sprawled on the floor in front of our clunky brown tv set. It had a dial to change the channels, and it made a popping sound when you turned it on and off, and they still showed test patterns after about 11pm at night. I was born in the good old days after all.

Nine years old, already a pair of enormous pink plastic glasses perched on my nose, and I’m watching some dorky kid from Newark, New Jersey (where the heck is that?) move to Reseda, California (at least I’ve heard of California, although I still don’t understand exactly what a state is), get beat up by bullies, become discipled to a cranky old Japanese guy, and fall in love with a rich blond chick named “Ali. With an I.” (Huh? Ali is a Muslim boy’s name. Crazy Americans).

Nine years old; completely blind to all of the film’s cultural context; having no idea that cars are supposed to be waxed on, let alone off; unaware that when Mr. Miyagi gets plastered and cries about his dead wife, we’re supposed to understand that she’s died in an internment camp while he was serving in the U.S. army; not even comprehending that “Daniel LaRousso” is an Italian name, and why that makes any difference whatsoever.

Nine years old, watching a story unfold in an alien landscape, and falling totally, completely, absorbingly, in love with Ralph Macchio.

He was my first crush, that gangly black-mopped kid with the strange accent and no social skills whatsoever. I didn’t even really know what kissing was, and here I could have died when I saw him practicing his Crane Kick against the sunset by the sea, my heart nearly twisted up with fear and admiration when he won the tournament even with a broken leg. I’m pretty sure I wrote Ralph Macchio’s name out on pieces of paper, just to see the letters in my own hand — pieces of paper which I then destroyed, because even at nine I knew that kind of thing was a gold-embossed invitation for vast stores of embarrassment to enter into your life.

Man. That Karate Kid, he sure was hot. And I sure was young. And that crush sure was heady.

I wonder if A.’s play contains a Daniel LaRousso character, too.

It’s also Ross’s mom’s birthday today! Happy Birthday, Barb!

No sand dollars — just a million extremely excited dogs enjoying the gorgeous, sunny day we had yesterday (a little chilly, but otherwise perfect). Because dogs aren’t allowed to be on the beach during the summer months, this is a good time of year for people to bring them to the water. I’m pretty sure we were the only two people there who weren’t accompanied by at least one fluffy monster. Quite a few folks had at least two or three romping about or getting their leashes tangled. Oddly, or perhaps not so, several of them seemed to have rather human names. It was a while before we realised the lady plaintively calling for “Nigel!” was not, in fact, summoning her child, but a tiny, rather grubby poodle. The owner of a colossal and very good natured jet-black Newfoundland could be heard saying to her sweetly lumbering charge, “Come here, baby. See what mommy has for you.” Dogs of every size and shape were flying over the sands, investigating each other’s butts, splashing into the (I’m sure quite frigid) waves to retrieve tennis balls, and altogether having a decidedly fantastic time.

Ross doesn’t really appreciate charms of a canine nature, but for me it just felt really good to be surrounded by so much positive energy and joy in life. Besides their sometimes absurd (and therefore endearing) physical appearances, the thing I like most about dogs is their overall existential enthusiasm, their unstoppable curiosity and appreciation for the stuff of the world about them. It’s an attitude I work at daily, and dogs are as good a role model as any.

In the evening, we went out and got a pizza stone so we could make pizza from scratch for the very first time. We topped the dough (churned in our bread machine) with homemade tomato sauce and liberal handfuls of salty prosciutto, oily black olives, fresh mozzarella and crumbles of goat cheese. It was, as you can quite clearly see, a pizza fit for the gods.

We ate it with the rapture of dogs at the ocean.