Posts Tagged → Time

I am remembering Scotty.

More than a week ago, my family terrier, Scotty, died suddenly and under very challenging circumstances. He was 9 years old.

Upon hearing the news of this death, I felt mired in melancholy. There were very few things that I loved in life more than playing “catch” with that dog – “catch” being a misnomer. What we played was more like, “Chase me mother fucker because you’re not getting this god damn ball.” In play, I somehow found incredible joy in being annoyed by this 10-pound asshole of a dog.

I often think it is silly to feel intense sadness at the death of an animal, especially amidst so much human pain in the world. However, Scotty was a dog that joined a very human family and remained family despite our hefty imperfections. He lived through the cycle of working class life – job losses, a dearth of money, more job losses, divorce, a destructive hurricane that destroyed much of what my family worked for, and imminent financial uncertainty. Despite living through a household of 4 that gradually dwindled in presence as he aged, Scotty was never angry. All he ever wanted to do was play “catch”.

Scotty died on a Wednesday after his health quickly deteriorated. My mother found him still warm, but absent of breathe, laying on the ground in the wing of our house that he is never in – the hallway leading to my room and my sister’s room. He was alone.

“I think it’s because he loved you two so much,” my mom said to my sister and I over the phone. If this is true, we were only there 1-2 times a year. And yet, he still loved us despite it all – always waiting for us to play “catch”.

In my grief, I have found myself ruminating a lot about time. Time has been unrelenting in its quickness – we are now more than halfway through 2018 and I am closer to 32 than I am to 31. Everyday, I am reminded of how time travels faster than I can process and, a times, handle. I hear it in the way my parents sound on the phone. I see it when I look at a clock wherein the hours have transpired, but my writing has not. I feel it in the financial concerns I harbor about my family’s future. Playing with Scotty was a way to stop time because he was never fixated about the past, had no obsession with the future, and only concerned himself with the resolute urgency of now – with ball, ball, ball, “catch”, “catch”, “catch”.

On the Friday after his death, I drove home after a long week of thinking about time, guilt, and sadness. On my way home, I noticed that the San Francisco Bay was blanketed in a magnificent, late summer sunset. It was a brilliant palette of rouge blending effortlessly into a hue of powder blue. The sunset was oddly late for an August evening and it lasted from the moment I walked out of my office, continued through my 10-mile traverse across California’s longest bridge, and remained as I inched closer to the San Francisco skyline where I met my partner. We watched the sun fade slowly as we ate dinner from a hilltop. I was convinced that it was Scotty.

“Thanks for the sunset, Scotty. You’re a good boy,” I said to no one.

When I visited Peru last year, I became infatuated with the country – the food, the biodiversity, and its rich indigenous history. I especially loved the country’s strong reverence for dogs. Peruvians believe that when humans pass away, it’ll be dogs that guide them across the river to the after-life.

I am not a religious person, but I am excited about the idea of seeing Scotty again, at a bend of treacherous river, with a ball in his mouth ready to play “catch”. I’m not sure how helpful we will both be in that situation given our talents (or lack thereof), but what’s the worse that can happen? We’re together, already dead and won’t be worried about time.

I am thinking that April 30 is a beautiful, sad day.

Today was a beautiful, sunny day in San Francisco – a respite from the torrents of rain that have defined this past winter in the Bay Area. I took a glorious walk in a sleeveless shirt and went through the motions of peaceful day: laundry, dish washing, reading.

Nearly 2,000 miles southeast of San Francisco, it was also a sunny day. In Houston, my father commenced his daily post-employment routine of exercising, sitting at the library, and going to temple. He made it to temple, but uncharacteristically left early to call my sister. He was sad, he told her. He was sad because 42 years ago today was the Fall of Saigon – forever changing the course of his life and, to some extent, mine.

I was not surprised to hear this. 42 years is a long time. Although time is supposedly an antidote to pain, I don’t find much truth in the idea that time heals. I think time obfuscates our memories and morphs them into happier or more anguished iterations. Worst of all, time seems to repeat itself. Another April 30 will come and go.  My father will feel sad.  I will feel reflective and write again about our loss. Years will pass and our collective political memory of Vietnam will fade, but will repeat itself in Afghanistan, then Iraq, and now Syria.

On April 30th’s of the past, I’ve often written long pieces about the implications of this day on the Vietnamese American community – the permanent feeling of being a tourist in our homeland; my broken ability to speak the language that connects me to Vietnam; the obstacles that my family had to overcome to acquire stability and normality on this land. Now, at the age of 30 on this April 30th, I’m most concerned about the normality of this day. My father and mother are the last connections I have to “authentic” Vietnamese culture. As I think about the family I would like to start one day, I worry that my children will think of Vietnamese history as foreign history and that they’ll never have the memory of hearing the stuttered, syncopated rhythm of the Southern Vietnamese anthem that haunted my childhood. April 30 will be a normal day of intellectual importance for them, not personal importance.

It’s a sunny, yet sad day for all of us.

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Please see below for an excerpt from Rory Kennedy’s excellent documentary, Last Days in Vietnam. Although the entire film is well made, the 3 minutes below features a poignant story of reflagging ships flying Southern Vietnamese flags with American flags.