monoceros blogs"No Longer a Teenager"
by Gerald Locklin
my daughter, who turns twenty tomorrow,
has become truly independent.
she doesn't need her father to help her
deal with the bureaucracies of school,
hmo's, insurance, the dmv.
she is quite capable of handling
landlords, bosses, and auto repair shops.
also boyfriends and roommates.
and her mother.
frankly it's been a big relief.
the teenage years were often stressful.
sometimes, though, i feel a little useless.
but when she drove down from northern California
to visit us for a couple of days,
she came through the door with the biggest, warmest hug in the world for me.
and when we all went out for lunch,
she said, affecting a little girl's voice,
"i'm going to sit next to my daddy,"
and she did, and slid over close to me
so i could put my arm around her shoulder
until the food arrived
i've been keeping busy since she's been gone,
mainly with my teaching and writing,
a little travel connected with both,
but i realized now how long it had been
since i had felt deep emotion.
when she left i said, simply,
"i love you,"
and she replied, quietly,
"i love you too."
you know it isn't always easy for
a twenty-year-old to say that;
it isn't always easy for a father.
literature and opera are full of
characters who die for love:
i stay alive for her.
Even though it rained this past Monday, I still felt we barely had any rain this past month. So when I woke to a cloudy, dusty gray sky today, I thought, yes! Rain again. By lunch time, it was pouring. And it rained again late in the night, through the night, for most of the night.
It was a good Saturday, because, believe it or not, I finally played my first game of Scrabble with my mother and two of her friends. I'm happy to report I won, and my mom came in second. After I ran off for a movie in the afternoon, my mother won the next game. Woo-hoo!
I'd imagined Saturday couldn't be better after the rain and Scrabble, but then the Japanese anime I caught at Orchard Cineleisure pushed it to the top of a short list of great Saturdays. I first discovered "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" or "Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo" or "Tokikake" (for short) at the Kinokuniya bookstore. In the manga section, tacked on a pillar is a huge poster of a schoolgirl in a short skirt leaping across a blue sky. "Opening in June," the sign said. I went home, did a Google search and found out that it'd won a major Japanese animation award - beating out even a Studio Ghibli film - and received many, many good reviews from critics and viewers lucky enough to have seen it in the few film festivals it played at.
The film's main delight is a high school girl, Makoto, who discovers the ability to time-leap or jump into the past. She tries out her power hesitantly at first, and then moves on to bigger things like singing karaoke for 10 hours (going back in time after each karaoke session ends), acing surprise tests that are no longer surprises to her, averting the usual school disasters like frying tempura in home econ and getting huge guys tossed in her direction. But when time-leaping involves fixing things for or about her best friends - two blokes named Chiaki and Kousuke - without their knowledge, the results get a little more complicated.
I loved the scenes of modern Tokyo; the lovely friendship between Makoto and the boys; how real their characters seemed in speech and behavior; the fine comedy of errors and bumbling efforts achieved only by high school students; the brilliant soundtrack with two classical solo piano pieces that reminded me of the hours I spent practicing piano as a teenager. Mostly, I loved the story and how it made me feel - nostalgic, wistful, thoughtful about how it's impossible to avoid certain events and being responsible for the effects if you did attempt to avoid them. There's something about high school (or in my case, junior college) that's unlike any other phase in life, and watching "Tokikake" made me wish, just for a few moments, that I was seventeen again, brimming with the kind of energy that makes a schoolgirl leap across a blue sky.
It's playing exclusively at Cathay cinemas in Singapore, and I expect only for a short period. Go watch it if you can. I've read that even non-anime viewers found it charming, moving, and very delightful.
Here's the trailer.
And a few reviews.
"Riveted"
by Robyn Sarah
It is possible that things will not get better
than they are now, or have been known to be.
It is possible that we are past the middle now.
It is possible that we have crossed the great water
without knowing it, and stand now on the other side.
Yes: I think that we have crossed it. Now
we are being given tickets, and they are not
tickets to the show we had been thinking of,
but to a different show, clearly inferior.
Check again: it is our own name on the envelope.
The tickets are to that other show.
It is possible that we will walk out of the darkened hall
without waiting for the last act: people do.
Some people do. But it is probable
that we will stay seated in our narrowed seats
all through the tedious dénouement
to the unsurprising end - riveted, as it were;
spellbound by our own imperfect lives
because they are lives,
and because they are ours.
As a newbie brownie in my first primary school, Marymount Convent, I was told to pick a country and enlighten the other girls about brownies and their activities in that country. After faster girls got their choice nation, I was left with two; I don't recall the other, only the one that I picked - Ireland. I didn't know a thing about the place, except that the first three letters were the same as my mother's name, Irene. Since my mother had supported my wish to be a brownie, and since she was my heroine when I was nine (and still is when I am twenty-nine), I pointed to the card that said "Ireland."
In time, I read Swift, Joyce, Yeats, Heaney, and counted Maeve Binchy as a guilty pleasure. I saw the Cliffs of Moher for the first time in a National Geographic Traveler magazine and vowed to visit one day.
I never did make it there though. And though my yearning for all things Irish waned, it never quite faded, returning every once in a while and tempting me to make good on that long-ago vow. When I was seventeen, I had a date in an Irish pub in Singapore, and as I tasted Irish food (or, as Irish as it gets in Asia) for the first time, I remembered the descriptions of colcannon and coddle I'd read and nearly forgotten. At college, I took a class with Richard Tillinghast, who made me write some of my best poetry (and also one rap, which I struggled to perform in class, so he performed it for me), and who had such a wealth of knowledge on Irish poets and poetry that it flowed out from even his fingernails. It was he who introduced me to Derek Mahon, and in particular, the poem "The Chinese Restaurant at Portrush." Incidentally, Professor Tillinghast was the only one in the classroom who recognized the phrase "billions of blistering barnacles," which I quoted during an alliteration exercise. "Captain Haddock," he said with a raised eyebrow. "Does anyone here know of Tintin?" he asked. The question delighted me to no end. During office hours that week, we talked about Tintin and my inability to rap. He was still teaching when I returned to grad school, but the spring I graduated was also the one when he retired and moved to Ireland.
In May, during my crazy days of grading over 50 examination scripts, I read a movie review about a little movie set in Dublin. Like "Waitress," that other film on my to-watch list, "Once" came out of the Sundance Film Festival and received excellent reviews. And they weren't for just the acting and the story, but also the music. I looked up the trailer and then added the title "Once" to my to-watch list. The song in the trailer, "Falling Slowly," is full of yearning, the melodic phrases shifting like water against a shoreline, and shutting my eyes, I conjured up a vision of the Cliffs of Moher (which I didn't really need to, since the Wikipedia has a few beautiful pictures).
I started this entry thinking I would write about "Once" but my on-off affair with Ireland took control instead. Still, watching the film is a reality that will happen sooner than my making it to Ireland. And even then, who knows if the small film will get to Singapore. I'll settle for listening to a few songs from the soundtrack, which I got from theyellowstereo.com. Let's hope that we'll get the soundtrack in Singapore some day too.
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A song, a poem, and a picture.
"Falling Slowly" by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová.
The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush
by Derek Mahon
Before the first visitor comes the spring
Softening the sharp air of the coast
In time for the first seasonal 'invasion'.
Today the place is as it might have been,
Gentle and almost hospitable. A girl
Strides past the Northern Counties Hotel,
Light-footed, swinging a book-bag,
And the doors that were shut all winter
Against the north wind and the sea-mist
Lie open to the street, where one
By one the gulls go window-shipping
And an old wolfhound dozes in the sun.
While I sit with my paper and prawn chow mein
Under a framed photograph of Hong Kong
The proprietor of the Chinese restaurant
Stands at the door as if the world were young,
Watching the first yacht hoist a sail
- An ideogram on sea-cloud - and the light
Of heaven upon the hills of Donegal;
And whistles a little tune, dreaming of home.
The Cliffs of Moher from Wikipedia