Sunday stroll

America’s favorite pastime back in the early 60’s was a Sunday drive; mine in Vietnam was a Sunday stroll with my Dad. Sunday was his only time to spare for me. We would breakfast in District 1 (beef stew) or District 5 (Pho Tau Bay). To work off those heavy beef-base meals, we would stroll along the sidewalks in front of Nam Quang theatre, our version of swap meet.

Saigon was built for street walkers, for horse carriages, tri-cycles and bicycles.

The French ladies who accompanied their husbands on their tour-of-duty could still be captured by black-and-white photographs, smoking and reading their newspaper for news back home (later, it would be Stars and Stripes when the GI’s set boots on the ground per Kennedy’s surge) while riding our cyclos.

I grew up hearing horse’s galloping leisurely on asphalt streets, very much like NYC back in 1910. Rarely did we find gasoline stations in the city. People just used their own muscles to save and make money. Environment – actually was a later concept when plastics started their invasion.

Old folks and young kids made for a distribute demographic albeit more women than men (since men were out to the front and died of attrition).

I myself accompanied my grandma each month on her trip to receive her pension (from my grandpa’s years in public service).

We had no concept of nursing homes, funeral homes or child-care facilities.

Neighborhood watch was our “child care”: self-policing and self-supporting. Funerals were conducted in: neighbors would tolerate three days of mourning. It’s a community inside a city.

Even the “round-about” were built so that all roads lead to “Rome”. We were never “separated but equal”. We were equal and never separated.

Everyone knew we were born, “served time” and got buried not too far from the “tree”, living in Bushmen’s time like the Lion King, to someday become a man, to replace our dads in a circular and endless world. To fight injustice, like the Three Amigos, to punch and get punched at, to have a temper and get stressed out from a life that did not deserve us, a war unfair and an aftermath uncalled for.

My Dad signed our house over to the State so he could join us in the US after a decade-long separation. Our strolls to Krispy Kreme, our new pastime, were never the same. Not like when I was kid, trying to catch up with his giant steps. To me, he represented a Vietnam (both time and place) that could never be re-captured: its former China-Franco-US-VN glory, of the Quiet American’s, and the British Invasion’s Reflections of My Life, of Suzie Q and Long Winding Road (of course, a lot of PX’s black-market Pall Mall and peanut butter).

Those used books and “classic Rock songs” now reside in my head, in my past, along with the jingle sound of horse galloping on Saigon post-colonial paved streets. My past, my present and my future, all merge into one endless loop, the tape.

Do You know Where You’re going to…do you like the things that life is showing you. …No I do not like them. I want my grandma. My life, my home ..my friends back. I did not ask for all this. No wonder Michael Jackson asked Diana Ross to be his friend, someone with empathy, to share those lonely and lost times (he even went on to build his own Fairy-Tale Amusement Park).

Those strolls are forever, easy like Sunday morning. I would trade anything just to have it once again. I know I know, un temp perdu, (ask Proust). Just like I no longer am a kid. I am a Daddy now, who makes sure his Daughter’s Sunday Strolls are just as memorable, passing-on worthy.

Passing it on is all I can do, as a node on our gene chain and mesh network. My past, your past, their past, all make sense when zooming out and out to reveal a moral universe which waits patiently to be discovered.