Excerpt from American Canyon
I drove up to my parent’s house in American Canyon and noticed that my mother
had carefully written “OM” in Sanskrit on both of the garage doors. I didn’t ask
her about it, preoccupied by memories of the apartment in Berkeley I had just moved
out of. For years I looked out into a world of sororities and fraternities. I could never
figure out why the busses that took them to their social events had to run idle for
hours while the girls primped their hair and got ready for their group dates with their
fraternity brothers. Or why their parents would park their Astrovans on the street,
blocking traffic, for hours. The road was half as wide as the cul de sac I imagined
they had driven from. I don’t know why my mother’s blessing on her garage doors in
our suburban track home development made me uncomfortable. My impulse was to
hide what makes us different.
Inside, I overheard CNN on the television. The news was saturated with terror alerts,
dirty bombs, anthrax. Colin Powell pointing at several canisters in the desert. I
wondered how many people laid awake in their beds waiting for the next plane crash,
the suitcase that will explode, or the letter in the mail that infects. If they dreamed of
airports with armed guards.
In other countries, the guards go unnoticed because they have been there for so long.
People dream of starvation.
Burning sand.
Children in the ruins of tanks.
Skylines.
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