Dear everyone,
I just finished reading Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, and I could not stop weeping. Well, the story was a sad account of childhood poverty and family tragedies, but the weeping was because Frank McCourt was able to write an entire book with endless amounts of neverending sentences and no quotation marks and yet so much beauty and music and here I am on the couch watching reruns of Law and Order and feeling my own brain atrophying and not producing a paragraph that is worthy of being spat on by Frank McCourt. I can’t help it. I come home from work exhausted and the last thing I can do is drag myself to the laptop that I bought especially for this purpose and force myself to compose something witty and lyrical when Eliott and Olivia are busy questioning some sort of murder suspect. I am a horrible human being and, worse, a terrible lazy aspiring writer. To cheer myself up I had a pound of Trader Joe’s dark chocolate and now I’m kind of hyper and Jameelah’s eyes widened when she discovered that I had eaten this much chocolate and she said you ate that much chocolate I can’t believe you ate that much how is that even possible and I said it was good so I ate it and that’s that.
Today Jameelah and I went to talk to the owner of a popular Vietnamese restaurant to negotiate with him the catering of our wedding reception. We gave him our catering budget and waited for him to laugh at us and kick us out of his restaurant but he was very nice and didn’t do that. The quest for a good wedding gets more and more complex. Who knew there was so much to think about. We’ve been searching for a place to have the reception and we want it outdoor but we have to worry about renting chairs and what if it rains. We’d have to rent some sort of cover but that costs like 900 bucks, can’t you believe that, 900 bucks to rent a tent? That’s ridiculous, ridiculous I said and Jameelah said calm down Sweets calm down and I calm down because she calls me Sweets. We wanted it outdoors next to a cherry blossom. That’s it, one cherry blossom tree, but I’m not even sure that they would still be in season in the middle of April when all manners of weather might destroy the cherry blossoms and the guests would stand there and say oh Lord poor Huy and Jameelah getting married near a sad and barren tree the poor heathens so now we’re looking for some place indoors. We looked at a Unitarian church but they charge 800 dollars so I say that’s ridiculous and Jameelah says mm-hm she agrees.
And what the heck is a rehearsal dinner? I’ve never heard of such a thing, but again I know nothing about birthin’ no babies when it comes to weddings. Right now we’re thinking of hiring some Bhangra dancers or a belly dancer or a palm reader or a caricaturist because the reception should be fun and what is more fun than watching a belly dancer after having your palm read at a wedding reception? Nothing. And I’m thinking of how to tell Dad if we have a belly dancer because surely he’ll have a heart attack, especially after we’ve decided, after weighing all of your thoughts, to have a vegetarian wedding, which, with a Vietnamese caterer, will pretty much be vegan.
It is Fall now and the trees are turning colors, and sometimes driving home I look at the leaves drifting down the street and I gaze at little houses I pass and think how nice it would be when J and I could have our own little place where we could grow tomatoes and blueberries and rainbow chard and have a compost bin. I get wistful sometimes thinking that my youth is over long over but I also get a little excited thinking of the pitter patter of little footsteps which will be that of a bunny the family pet and the small voice of Huy Jr. saying Daddy look the blueberries are ripe can we pick them and feed them to the bunny and I would say of course son of course. That’s how I would talk when I’m a dad, all patient like that.
So I guess the wedding is not too bad. We should enjoy the moment, for there is much after that to look forward to.
It is now almost 1am and I should go to bed. My stomach is hurting a little bit. I shouldn’t eat this much chocolate again. Tomorrow is another day and I hope it gets foggy because I love waking up on fall days when the air is saturated with fog and the warm damp earthy scent of barely decaying leaves. I love fall in Seattle even if there is a wedding to worry about. Life is good. Talk to you soon.
Huy
