Iyow - in your own words

The Chinese New Year, the Year of the Purple Boar began on Sunday, February 18, 2007. What’s special about the year of the Purple Boar? It closes the 12-year cycle in the Chinese calendar, making it a time for reaping benefits from past efforts. It should also be a time of peace. We’re two months in, but here’s a little background on what you can expect for the next ten months….
(Image linked from http://imprint.uwaterloo.ca.)

“Gung Hai Fat Choi!”
The traditional new year greeting literally means “congratulations on prospering in money.” But it generallyis used more like “trick or treat” on Halloween—except that kids who say “Gung Hai Fat Choi” may be hitting you up for lai see (cash in red envelopes).

What can you expect from a pig year?
The Year of the Boar is a time of fun and some licentiousness. Pleasure and enjoyment of the good life will be valued more than power and status. Pig years are a time to be close to the people you care about. Most people splurge a bit on extravagances this year and then scale back in the rat year.

The Chinese believe that the Boar year brings good fortune for intellectuals, financiers, and best of all for… women. While this is a time to enjoy, some cautions I feel duty bound to pass on—make sure your pleasures don’t yield pains to you or those you care about.

Kate was 26, just out of law school and working at a big law firm. She was a second generation Nuyorican who grew up in New York and spoke Spanish because her grandparents still spoke mostly Spanish and she’d studied it in school since sixth grade.

She worked as a first year associate lawyer and often stayed late at the office to draft documents for more senior lawyers and finish her assignments. Many evenings, she was the last person in the office and the cleaning lady, Rosela – a petite and plump Ecuadorian woman in her late 30s, with teeth that jutted out so much that it was difficult for her to completely close her mouth and with brassy highlights dyed into her hair – would often stop by Kate’s office to chat. Rosela had a wonderful sense of humor, and she often ribbed Kate about her long work hours (“these are the best years of your life, how are you spending them staring at books?!”). Rosela asked Kate to help her find a millionaire lawyer to marry and rescue her, or if Kate couldn’t manage that, Kate should find one for herself, have a whole minivan full of babies, and then hire her to live with Kate’s family in their big, beautiful mansion.

Blood and Boogers and Shit, Oh My!

Here’s a story from one of those days where mundane things pass before my eyes. I don’t usually take notice, log these infinitesimally small things or seek to record them. They become part of what can only be described as another day, beneath the “dividing and indifferent blue” of an October sky.

I was walking down the street last Saturday in my neighborhood in downtown Chicago and this Black homeless man carrying a small black shopping bag and box from Saks crossed my path on his way to rummage through another garbage can. I’d watched him dig through a can near the park where Basil, my black lab and I were playing.

The dog park has only recently opened. For the past six months it has consisted of a small, grassless, muddy enclosure where dogs did their business and perfunctorily retrieved the ball a few times before heading home with nary a look back.

The Aymara language, spoken by people living in the high Andes talks about the future as if it lies behind you and the past spreads out in front of you. Aymara speakers refer to the future as qhipa pacha/timpu meaning back or behind time and the past nayra pacha/timpu meaning front time. Their hand gestures are in keeping with their thoughts—they gesture ahead of themselves when remembering the past and backwards when talking about the future.

What is known is seen in front of you, what is unknown is behind you, hidden from view (the future).

I’ve reached my thirties with alarming rapidity. I didn’t know that I would live that long; I celebrate the accomplishment. My parents are visiting for my birthday. I see the folds of skin softening on my mother’s neck, the deepening bags under her eyes, the softening of my father’s stomach, the graying of their hair and I mark the passage of time in their faces and bodies in a way that I can’t seem to see in myself.

The public release of the 9/11 tapes in the Moussaoui trial — recorded conversations of people trapped inside of the World Trade Center with 9-1-1 emergency response operators — has reopened a wound. I sit, reading The New York Times, looking at a family, an older couple who lost a child in his prime. He died early one morning at work. I weep. Reading the excerpts of the transcripts brings back those agonizing moments, the plunging bodies, a leap from a hundred stories up to avoid burning to death. The smoke, the marching throngs, and an explosion in my home city revive in those few words.

I read their pleas, “Please hurry.” “Yeah, hi, I am on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center, which had an explosion.” “We had a conference up here, there’s about 100 people up here.” The operator responded, “Just sit tight.”

She got into the cab, he was a young, Eastern European guy with dark hair and intense eyes. He was listening to loud, angry techno. He avoided her eyes. She had the vague feeling that he’d driven her home before, and that he’d been a reckless driver, perhaps it was déjà vu. She got out her cell phone and called her husband, someone would know where she was if she disappeared.