Moss and memory

Outer and inner life. The later is more important.

It makes a total person, from cradle to the grave, both context and contour.

At the present, cancer, stroke and dementia remain our top challenges.

Slow decline and certain death. Faded memory. No recall. No joie de vivre.

A long goodbye.

I spoke to my sister, 19 years my senior. She couldn’t recall who I was. I might as well talk to an alien from Mars.

I wanted to remind her of the times she went looking for me who was swept alongside a marching mob, tiki torches and repetitive chants “tung tung tung dzo dzo” for no reasons except for the season of celebrated Children’s Festival on the Lunar Calendar.

Or when she played proxy mom to drop me off on my first day of school (joining a group of hysterical children of similar abandoning fate).

She couldn’t recall our most recent trip to New Orleans, after we had passed vast land of the South.

My sister virtually drift from one nap to another.

Months ago, she fought hard, wanting to pack up and move out to her own place. Self-alluding, she thought she could still manage independent living.

Not now. From the tone of it, friends no longer call. Visitors less frequent.

The candle is dimming out. Only amber and echo of her former life.

When we are no more.

Footprints and fingerprints. Residuals and retirement.

Just mopping up the last vegetated part on borrowed time. As if life were a bowl of soup, sooner or later, we would reach bottom. Scraping what’s left before handing back the empty vessel to nature. Stardust, carbon nano dust. A few dollars’ worth of not-so rare earth.

To me, she still is my sister. The only one I have and look up to. Four adults, busy working and moving about. Often one assumed the others would be watching me. Then it’s she who noticed I had been missing.

In that refugee enclave where Cronkite once visited and concluded “the best scenario is a stalemate”.

Where would an active child, her youngest brother be, if not with the noticeably loud and increasing in number mob which at the time, circulated the neighborhood (other times, it might be home movies projected on the side wall, our version of Cinema Paradiso albeit low-tech and high-risk war times).

She always noticed things. Like on the day before Saigon fell. How desolate she must have looked standing there on the street corner, waiting for her husband. She saw people moving about, violating curfew. How their survival instinct was much stronger than hers. The eerie absence of the American (at the end of the “American War”) pushed her button:” They have abandoned us.”

On the surface, the city remained calm. But inside the walls of the Embassy, of the Airport, things were frantic: dollars burned, babies left behind. Only purses and passports, people staged in batches for chopper lift, often time with maximum occupation.

In a hurry, her brain cells came alive. Connecting the dots, she summoned her mate, rnaternal instincts (four kids) and rounded up us from routine siesta.

It’s my sister, born in the year of the Buffalo, that pulled forward by the seat of the pants. Even the plot next to her husband’s was reserved – under her name, spelled correctly (I am sure she double checked like a CPA she was). She anticipated failure of memory. Just in case. Like now.

When one secured a permanent resting place (in the Serenity section of the Memorial Park), one welcomes dementia. Go ahead, hit me. Got nothing to lose. Fearless leader that put men of war to shame.

Moss and memory. Slow build-up to Appendix section of a narrative with beginning, middle and – blank – ending.

May I have the soundtrack of Torna a Surriento please. That piece helps me circle back to our house in an alley where my siblings and I – with much anticipation, upgraded it a new coat of paint in the days leading to Tet. We covered the moss and put a fresh layer on memory. Although filling out only the missing spots at the bottom, I was glad to be part of a team, who together, made a humble life for ourselves in that tight and noisy alley. Saigon District 3 my home.