“Am I alive?”
That’s the question my daughter kept asking as she gazed out from Trojan Point, high on Mount Tam. It was the kind of day when you could see clear out to the Farallon Islands thirty miles into the Pacific, then turn the other way to see the Golden Gate Bridge and the towers of San Francisco and Mount Diablo shimmering in the distance. We had spent the morning in Muir Woods, where my wife told my father that for some reason she felt like crying, and he told her that was a pretty normal response to Muir Woods. The redwoods were still dripping after two weeks of heavy rain that had ended just the night before, and the creek was full. When we finished, my mother reminded us of a beautiful lookout point we used to visit when I was young, and so we followed in our car up the winding road that passes onward to Stinson Beach, where later we would find some sand dollar shells that are now prized possessions in one of my daughter’s treasure boxes.
Even in a place as special as Mount Tamalpais, Trojan Point is special, and we had the good fortune to be there on a clear January day, cool but not cold, when the usually golden grasses had turned a bright, impossible green. For my daughter, who had never been to Northern California before, it was hard to believe any of it was real. Had she died and gone to some sort of heaven? And so she kept asking. For months afterward, Trojan Point kept appearing in her drawings, and sometimes at night when I would tell her sleepy stories — rambling meditations that take place in some or other comforting setting — it was Mount Tam, with its gnarled oak trees and green grasses and outcrops of soft, slippery serpentine, that she would as for again and again.
Something like normal
Looking back as I like to do on my birthday, I see this as a year of emerging.
COVID is still with us — my wife and I both got it again, my parents finally came down with it — but the emergency of COVID came to an end, and life got back to something like normal. Faces reemerged from behind masks, and I realized how much I had missed them. For the first time since the pandemic began, we traveled abroad, back to the United States. We stayed in hotels. Here in Korea, we took our daughter to Swan Lake, her first ballet. My company gave me a gift of season passes to Everland, an amusement park owned by the Samsung group (or maybe they own us, it’s hard to tell, the whole thing is an opaque web), and I’ve taken my daughter a bunch of times. We go on Friday afternoons when it’s not too crowded, do a couple of the county fair-type rides that make Daddy want to throw up, get some pasta for dinner, and then maybe ride the Amazon Express. It makes her very happy, and that makes me very happy. She’s nine and a half now, and it’s a great age.
Those trips abroad began with a visit to San Francisco to participate in the Samsung Developer Conference in October. I spent much of that trip — probably too much — up in Marin, revisiting the places I grew up, and it was a delight to be there. I realized how much it would mean to me to show all this to my wife and daughter, and then my wife had the lovely idea to invite my parents along so they could visit their old friends. And so the three of us made our way to visit my parents in Phoenix in January, and from there we all continued on to Marin County. We stayed in Mill Valley, and my Korean family got to see Lucas Valley and the house where I grew up and the hills where I played when I was a kid. We went up to the Elephant Rocks and Dylan Beach, and we visited the Charles M. Schulz Museum — my wife loves Snoopy — and we went up to a winery in the Napa Valley, and then we finished the whole thing with a couple of days at Disneyland, where my daughter was old and brave enough to ride the Matterhorn and Space Mountain. But it was the Redwoods and grasses of Mount Tam, I think, that stayed with us the most.
Composing
This was also the year that the words began to emerge. Last year I said this was the year I would begin writing my memoir in earnest, and so I have. I’m closing in on a hundred thousand words, but I’m nowhere near finished, in part because the process of writing turns out to be one of discovery, and I keep finding new avenues to explore, new topics that need researching.
If it were fiction, it would be almost a truism to say that you just need to follow your characters and see what they do, that your themes will emerge from that. When it’s a memoir, though, you tend to think you already know more or less what happened, and it’s must a matter of getting it all on the page.
Not so.
It’s a little weird to realize that you’re writing an unreliable narrator when the narrator is you, but here we are.
In writing about my arrival in India, my sudden decision to veer north into Nepal, my time in Kathmandu, and my experiences trekking in the Annapurnas, I’ve been able to recognize the development in my main character, moments when he — I — seemed to be a little changed, a little different. There’s still a long way to go just to write a first draft that takes me through the whole of the journey, but already I can see a lot that was hidden before the writing began. Which is why, on the cusp of writing about Varanasi, I’m suddenly reading histories of the Jews, Jerusalem, and the modern Chabad Chassidic movement. Who knew?
As with the trip to India itself, the journey of writing about it is one that keeps surprising me, and yet there’s a path ahead that I know I need to follow. So for this year, I hope to get to the end of that first draft — to walk it through the remaining parts of that old trip, to Varanasi and Agra and Rajasthan, down to Cochin and its old synagogue, the modernity of Bangalore and the Vijayanagar ruins of Hampi and the idiotic beaches of Goa (we’ll get to that, we’ll get to that). Hopefully by the time I see you next birthday, I’ll have made it all the way back to Manhattan in 1998.
Coronation
So one more thing. I ended this year of my life with a coronation.
Over the past few weeks, I have learned some things.
I have learned that my tongue is too big.
I have learned that my mouth is too small.
When I took a sore molar to the dental clinic at my office, the dentist suggested that I would need four visits to complete a root canal, followed by a fifth visit to fit a crown, except that maybe the crown would be impossible because of my big tongue and my small mouth. So what would happen if I didn’t get a crown? Well, the tooth would turn black and have to be removed eventually. She looked mournful and shook her head as she told me this.
Not entirely satisfied with this plan, I went to a nearby dental clinic, where they assured me they got many refugees from the clinic at my office. There they plunged into the challenge, and it was by no means easy, but they got it done at least. (And here is where I wonder why they can do heart surgery by going up through your leg, but scraping out a molar means opening wide enough for a dentist to shove his actual fingers in the back of your mouth.) Four visits was better than five, and though there was a lot of complaining about my tongue and exhorting me to relax — they don’t give you gas here, but they should — there was no giving up. And so, after a false start with a crown that didn’t fit, I got one that did, just in time for my birthday.
Time to dip that thing in cake!