Starting the Day

Starting the day

Barely awake, I pulled the shade. It was a pristine day out, in that the blackberry brambles were so real in the emerald light, dew drops on them, with the symmetry of quadratic curves, and so I turned from being a number cruncher to a wordsmith; either way, I was going to penetrate the ordinary.

How Zen-like when the world holds still and you can peel it layer by layer until naked existence remains. Then a freight train rumbles across the dirt field, beyond the children’s playground, beyond the pipeline, and already there was glory in the morning flowers. It was summer in Aberdeen on Bay Avenue.

I am a being in the world. I had come with a set of baggage but I must not lose sight of them. I can travel all day in my mind and travel light and far, rounding the curves of infinity, only to come back to the familiar. The familiar was sparrows and robins. But once I saw a blue jay and that was truly a lucky day.

I was twenty-four and it was a Saturday morning. I hurriedly got up and wrote longhand on a legal pad. I was not a lawyer but nevertheless I sought to write clearly and economically. Papers were cheap and so were pens, but my time was ticking and what was lost can never return. However, when I was that young no one thought of alerting me. They had their own stakes to harvest, so they planned. I was still starry eyed and I purchased a Writers’ Market, and a day old donut and a Styrofoam of cold coffee were enough to kindle my hopes.

Koon Woon

2-10-2018

Weekdays I worked for the Kerns DeSoto furniture factory. The wood comes out of the saw at a rate that the feeder guy controls on the other end. I have seconds to reject the blemished and worm-holed pieces onto the conveyor belt and they are carried to the “hog” where they are burned. The good pieces I stack onto the pallet. I do this eight hours a day. They told us we must join the union and so I was in the union. What the union did for us was that if they were working us too hard, a piece of wood will mysteriously jam the conveyor belt, and the management will have to dislodge the errant pieces. This gave us a few minutes to take a breather.

Every two hours we were giving a 10-minute break, a half hour for lunch. Not knowing any better, I first took my sack lunch to the lunchroom, where everybody was eating on long tables. A couple of girls looked at me and showed curiosity because of my race – Chinese – and so I got glares from the silent rednecks who cud like cows, chewing their bologna sandwiches. So, my brother and I went outside to eat, sitting on the grass in the sun leaning against the aluminum siding of the factory. They told us that if we miss one day of work, we are de facto fired. And one day I just didn’t feel like going to work and so I was de facto fired.

While the summer job lasted, I come home to our old house on Bay Avenue and I take a nap with sawdust still in my lungs. When I wake, I would read my Abstract Algebra book, a classic written by I. N. Herstein. That was the most productive time I ever had reading math, because it was pure joy to be doing something from the other extreme of mindless work as in the factory. Even today, forty-some years later, I could still give you the definition of a group, a normal subgroup, its centralizer, etc. One amusing incident when I was at the University of Oregon, when I checked out a book on Group Theory, the student library clerk said, “Oh, you are interested in Group Therapy.” That will come sometime later, but let’s not get ahead of our story yet.

2-14-2018

Koon Woon