The things I carried

Among them, besides two set of clothes, was my birthday’s gift: a Collegiate Dictionary.

For the love of words and of a world that has yet to be discovered. It’s as it is today, slightly cool and conducive to sleeping-in. Yet I needed to show up for a rendezvous: my fateful trip to State College. A stranger, at the wheels, represented a group of profs called The Sycamore (house church) who chipped in to “do something”.

A quiet American, he perhaps was thinking along the same line that he had “wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry” like Graham Greene.. These professors meant business. They did not just chuckle while watching the collapse of S Vietnam on TV e.g. the dropping of bodies from the sky and the lingering refugees population at a camp near them.

When we finally met, they brought warm clothes, music sheets and job-vacancy list. But still, I valued that birthday gift given to me from officemates back at the camp. That dictionary, among the things I carried, opened a door to my future.

Months earlier, my brother-in-law sliced opened a Larousse English-Vietnamese dictionary’s back cover and hid a hundred-dollar bill inside. For the road. Just in case. Today, that dictionary lays like a relic of the past, nothing but its intrinsic value, for sentimental more than linguistic reason.

Words, words, words…change, change, change.

No longer do I need to acquire new words, like “psychology” (what’s that silent “p” doing there at the front?). More truthfully, I have since picked up nuances of our times, like “sycophant”, “spineless” and “roguish”.

Strange times call for strange tongues.

Centers of influence and thought leadership have moved around, with the flow of oil, software, AI and Nvidia, in this “flat” world of 24/7 world where a death toll here, a death toll there ( a Turkish-American US citizen killed in West Bank, a severe typhoon that took the lives of Northern Vietnamese) are no longer the things of secret.

It’s not like Los Alamos that was kept under wraps for nuclear fission quiet development. Today belongs to folks who self-advertise, self-promote and self-destruct e.g. from Kissinger to Kinzinger, Carson to Carville on broad daylight, on TikTok or what not.

BTW, who would have thought the NY TIMES (which used to scoop by publishing the Pentagon Papers) now opens a representative office in Vietnam, or the Philippines and Vietnam, victims of seasonal typhoon and China aggression, now joint-forces at sea to protect their mutual territorial interests.

Life moves on and language reflects that. Its free flow. Totally!

Dell posted something about water spray (midst) on LinkedIn. The re-post shows tons of comments, mostly sincere, but many I suspect, just trailing the leader for self-promotional visibility.

Social and superficial media.

Life as a result makes sceptics out of us all. If you have not been injured, physically or psychologically, you have not been living.

I carried two set of clothes to Penn State on one arm and a Webster’s dictionary on the other. Little did I know, I no longer need it ( replaced with spell-check and Google search).

I missed it when students walked away from their seats just to look up in library card catalogue, or our shared and opened dictionary. The inquisitive and scholar urge to discover.

We have more means now to look up things, to name things and to call out things. Yet we are immobile, tranquilized and static. As if inaction and inertia will magically improve in locked steps with inflation. As if the past will somehow edit itself. As if the dead will be resurrected and reunited with us on Earth – without us ever see “the End” as seen after watching a flick.

In the beginning was the word. Past tense. It’s up to us to conjugate, to look it up, to edit and revise it. Life is nothing but a story whose words are constantly replenished, evolved and spellchecked, to be lived and relived, revised and recounted,

The things I carried.

One time, I let my long lost nephew into my bachelor room. I then told him to take anything he would like. Out ran the guy, at the speed that overtook my objection, with my Samsonite briefcase. It was when yuppies still wore suspenders and carried heavy things to work (when snapped shut those briefcase make an official sound, like a blue-collar punch-in at factory timestamps clock).

The things we carry – get lighter as technology flows more freely (drone, phone and AI). Still, the burden in our heads are still there, with less bandwidth, occasionally unerasable unless we’ve got Alzheimer’s. Like the Count of Monte Cristo’s. We reinvent ourselves with new-found wealth which come with newly bought titles and name prefixes affixed to mail boxes with new-found zip codes.

Yet inside, we are torn, between conflicting aspirations and ambition. Tears of agony are so readily flown, from our Count’s eyes, hid behind the curtain while he watched people who hurt him now got what they deserve, or people who helped him also got what come their way.

The things I carried, in the beginning was the word; yet words by themselves are cheap…unless accompanied by action, action that bear personal consequences e.g. loss of blood, lives and limps.

I no longer learned stuff like “psychology” or “esoteric”. Now, I come across e.g. “sycophant”, “roguish” and “alternate facts” all generated by our spirit of the times. Still I carry old words in my head, leaving my dictionary at home, like my bro-in-law who after retrieving his 100-dollar bill for his new life in the States, unbuckled himself with that heavy bi-lingual Larousse once served as a concealed petty-cash box across the ocean.

The things we carried.